Dr. Martin Hartmann

Research area

Dr. Hartmann’s research is positioned at the interface between microbial ecology, soil science, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. He studies the response of the soil microbiome to environmental change in order to better understand its consequences for ecosystem functionality. The soil microbiome is a central and highly complex component of terrestrial ecosystems, delivering key ecosystem services such as regulation of plant growth, nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, climate resilience, and pest and disease control. A deep understanding of how anthropogenic and climatic drivers shape diversity and functioning of the soil microbiome will be key to sustainably manage or conserve ecosystems. Improving our incomplete perception of microbial life on earth lies at the basis of all these endeavors and is strongly coupled to current advances in molecular genetic technologies and bioinformatics.

Dr. Hartmann received his PhD in Microbial Ecology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in a joint thesis together with the Agroscope agricultural research institute in Zurich. His PhD research focused on the influence of different agricultural management practices on soil bacterial diversity in the DOK long-term agricultural field trial. In 2007, he received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Centre for Microbial Diversity and Evolution at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. During this time, his research focused on the impact of different timber harvesting strategies on the forest soil microbiome in various sites of the North American Long-Term Soil Productivity network. During his education, Dr. Hartmann developed a fundamental understanding of the ecology of microorganisms and the molecular and bioinformatic toolbox to study them in complex environments. In 2011, he returned to Switzerland to work on various projects in agricultural and forest ecosystems at both the Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and Agroscope. In 2015, he got appointed as a senior research at WSL. Since 2018, Dr. Hartmann is a senior scientist in the Sustainable Agroecosystems group at the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, combining rsearch and teaching in the area of microbial ecology.

Dr. Hartmann's activities reach beyond his own research interests. He is the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Soil Biology and an editorial board member of Frontiers in Terrestrial Microbiology and PeerJ. He further serves as a frequent ad hoc reviewer for more than 10 journals in the area of Microbial Ecology. He is actively involved in training the next generation of scientists in the field of high-throughput DNA sequencing and bioinformatics by regularly teaching at international training schools in this area. Martin Hartmann is a member of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.