Dr. Brittan S. Scales

Broadly, I am interested in understanding the membership, structure and importance of microbial communities, often referred to as microbiomes. At the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, I focus on microbial communities that form on plastic waste in aquatic environments, with an emphasis on the Baltic Sea. I use a combination of in silico methods, such as next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics, as well as in vitro methods, such as cultivation. My research attempts to go beyond ‘who’ is there, to understand why and how these plastic-microbiomes form and are important to aquatic environments and the people that interact with these environments.

In the past I worked in the human lung microbiome. Through this work I also gained expertise in animal modelling, immunology and working with human pathogens.