On May 14, 2025, the Research Foundation Baltic Sea awarded early career researcher Anna Sophia Kujat from the IOW with a prize for her outstanding master's thesis “Recognition of patterns in microbial communities in the Warnow estuary and in Baltic Sea coastal waters using methods of topic modelling and machine learning”. The prize was awarded at the Ocean Museum Germany in Stralsund and is endowed with 2000 euros.

Microbial communities are of crucial importance for aquatic ecosystems because of their metabolic activities and they also allow important conclusions about the current environmental status of the respective system. However, due to their taxonomic diversity, they are difficult to analyse. Anna Sophia Kujat convinced the jury of the Research Foundation Baltic Sea with the interdisciplinary approach of her master's thesis, which she used to address the challenge of highly complex data analysis: She emplyed a method from computational linguistics and machine learning to recognise temporal and spatial patterns in microbial communities in the Warnow estuary and in coastal Baltic Sea waters. She analysed an extensive microbiome dataset that had been generated over the course of a year at 15 different sampling stations as part of the OTC Genomics project. Kujat was able to show that her chosen method produces patterns from the data that are not only intuitively comprehensible, but also ecologically relevant. The work, which was supervised by Theodor Sperlea from the IOW working group Environmental Microbiology, is proof of how versatile machine learning methods can be used in interdisciplinary contexts. In the future, they are expected to allow the highly specific detection of anthropogenic influences on microbial communities in aquatic ecosystems, such as pollutant discharges, and thereby enabling a much more effective monitoring.

Anna Sophia Kujat completed a bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Greifswald from 2017 to 2021. In 2021, she began her master's degree in marine biology at the University of Rostock, which she completed in 2023. Currently, she is working on her doctoral thesis ‘Machine Learning Methods for Analysing Biological and Ecological Data Sets’ at the IOW in cooperation with the University of Rostock.

The prize of the Research Foundation Baltic Sea is awarded annually. It is awarded to young scientists for outstanding research work on the fauna and flora of the Baltic Sea, neighbouring waters and coastal habitats as well as research on the impact of increasing economic exploitation on the marine environment.

Further information on this year's award ceremony (in German) >> here