I have been a professor of Microbial Ecology since 1998. My PhD work was conducted at the Laboratory of Chemical Ecology, Lund University, and was focused on developing methods for analyzing chemical markers for the biomass and structure of microbial communities. I joined the Department of Microbial Ecology in Lund after a two year post-doc in the USA. My major research interest is to understand the biology and functional ecology of soil-living fungi.

My present research focuses on examining the molecular mechanisms underlying the decomposition of organic matter by ectomycorrhizal and saprotrophic fungi and how this activity affect the cycling of nutrients and carbon in forest soils. We are studying how the functional activities encoded in the genomes of fungi are linked to biogeochemical processes operating at different spatial scales – from nanoscale minerals to forest sites using methods from genomics, molecular geochemistry, physical chemistry and computational biology. 

Since 2011, I am an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.