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Michaela Dippold is a professor in Geosciences with main interest in terrestrial element cycles and the interactions with global change. As a Geoecologist she puts her focus on research at biosphere-geosphere interfaces, like roots in the soil and questions about resource limitation.

Biography
Michaela Dippold is a first generation academic and now a professor at the Department of Geosciences at the University of Tübingen, Germany, heading her own group ‘Geo-Biosphere Interactions’ since 2021.

Michaela was the eldest of three children on a family farm in Bavaria. Her father taught her early in her life, that the thin layer of soil is the basis for global food production. And that a hand full of soil is the most valuable good on earth. This idea shaped her, so she studied Geoecology and obtained her M.Sc. degree in 2009, followed by a M.Sc. degree in Biochemistry (2011) from the university of Bayreuth, Germany During the studies for her PhD-Thesis she performed field studies on her father’s land, cared for her grandma until she died and worked on the farm – from giving birth to calves to operating tractors.

Her thesis ’Metabolic pathways of Amino Acids, Monosaccharides and Organic Acids in Soils assessed by Position-Specific Labeling’ for a doctorate in Geoecology (Dr.rer.nat.) was successfully defended with summa cum laude in 2014 in the University of Bayreuth (Germany). Since 2013 she has been working as a Academic assistant at the Department of Agricultural Soil Science, University of Goettingen until 2017, when she was awarded with the Robert-Bosch Junior Professorship 2017. On this basis, she started to chair her own group Biogeochemistry of Agroecosystems as a Junior Professor in the Department of Crop Sciences (Faculty of Agriculture) of the Georg-August University Goettingen.

Research
Daniela Dippolt´s research group hosts scientists from different nationalities. Especially the involvement of African doctoral students, postdocs and guest researchers is particularly important to her, as climate change is most severe in the semi-arid regions. This makes sub-Saharan Africa one of her central research areas. Michaela brings new methods from Biochemistry directly to environmental science to better understand and support adaptation of ecosystems to climate change, to contribute to the development of sustainable land use and to underpin food security by promoting a new generations of plants which is better adapted to the use of the increasingly limited soil resources.

Her main research interests are :

•	Biosphere-geosphere interfaces as hotspots of terrestrial element cycles

•	Ecophysiological control of microorganisms on ecosystem C, nutrient and water fluxes

•	Recycling as energy-efficient strategy driving environmental organic matter turnover

•	Root and rhizosphere traits reflecting adaptation strategies to (multiple) resource limitation

•	Sustainable utilization of limited resources in (agro-)ecosystems facing global change

She is a member of European Geoscience Union (EGU), European Association of Organic Geochemistry (EAOG), German Association of Stable Isotopes Research (GASIR), German Soil Science Union (DBG).

Awards
2015: Fritz-Scheffer-Award of the German Soil Science Union for outstanding achievements in Soil Science

2017: Division (Biogeosciences) Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award for outstanding research in the field of terrestrial biogeosciences. The originality of her research is the use of position specific labeling of organic molecules to understand their turnover and fate in soil.

2017: Robert-Bosch Junior Professorship in 2017 for the project “Sustainable Use of Renewable Natural Resources”

2018: "Norddeutscher Wissenschaftspreis” for the Consortia-Project on Multi-Meta-Omics by the Northern German Scientific Council, together with Sandra Spielvogel from the University of Kiel

Selected publications
First experimental confirmation that microbes in soil produce significant amounts of storage compounds with implications for C cycling and stress resistance of soil functions.
 * Mason-Jones, K., Breidenbach A., Dyckmans J., Banfield C.C., Dippold M.A., 2023. Intracellular carbon storage by microorganisms is an overlooked pathway of biomass growth. Nature Communications 14, 2240. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37713-4

First in situ approach to differentiate metabolic fluxes of individual bacterial groups demonstrating linkage of carbon use efficiency with citric acid cycle
 * Wu, W., Dijkstra, P., Hungate, B.A., Shi, L., Dippold, M.A., 2022. In situ diversity of metabolism and carbon use efficiency among soil bacteria. Science Advances 8. 10.1126/sciadv.abq3958

Study disentangled large-scale geo-bio interactions under changing land use impact at the Tibetan Plateau
 * Breidenbach, A.*, Schleuss, P.-M.*, Liu, S., Schneider, D., Dippold, M.A., de la Haye, T., Miehe, G., Heitkamp, F., Seeber, E., Mason-Jones, K., Xu, X., Huanming, Y., Xu, J., Dorji, T., Gube, M., Norf, H., Meier, J., Guggenberger, G., Kuzyakov, Y., Spielvogel, S., 2022. Microbial functional changes mark irreversible course of Tibetan grassland degradation. Nature Communications 13, 2681. 10.1038/s41467-022-30047-7