Draft:Michaela Dippold

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.

Michaela Dippold, professor in Geoscience at the univeristy of Tübingen

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

Michaela Dippold studies the land surface, disentangling element fluxes within various terrestrial ecosystems, from natural ones like tropical rainforests to those intensively used by humans like croplands. She focuses on interactions of its abiotic components – the geosphere – and its inhabing organisms – the biosphere. One intensive contact zone where bio- and geosphere are heavily interrelated, is located below our feet: the contact zone between roots and soils – the so-called rhizosphere. Roots take up nutrients from the soil – a pre-requisite for plant growth. They harness the surrounding microorganisms to support nutrient mobilization from the geosphere. Plant photosynthetic fixed carbon, channeled through the microbial mechanism, provides the energy source for these processes, underlying the exchange of C for water and C for nutrients at such geo-biosphere interfaces. She specifically looks at conditions, when water or nutrients are scarce and natural ecosystems need to maintain their high productivity despite lowest natural resource availability in the environment. Understanding these mechanisms help to better adapt our crop to such conditions, which will be aggravated by global change. It also helps to support nature conservation preparing natural ecosystems for global change.

Michaela Dippold follows interdisciplinary approaches. She applied metabolic flux analysis – a method derived from biochemistry and medicine - into soil microbiology unraveling for the first time which metabolic pathways are involved in processing the organic matter in soils producing the greenhouse gas CO_2. She also applied advanced multi-directional isotope tracing to uncover processes in the plant rhizosphere, by that pioneering the understanding of how plants interact with their associated microbiome triggering adaptations to environmental stresses below-ground.

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

• 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

• 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. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abq3958

• 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. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-30047-7

External links

• Michaela Dippolt on Research Gate
• Michael Dippolt´s website at the University of Tübingen