MsRenske Jongen

ABOUT

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney, where I study how microbial communities shape the responses of seagrasses to environmental change. My work combines field experiments, aquaria studies and molecular tools to understand how the invisible world belowground drives the performance of marine plants.

HOW I ENDED UP HERE

I didn’t start my career studying plants. Or microbes. During my MSc (2014–2018, Utrecht University), I was firmly in the animal camp. I worked on winter moth phenology (Operophtera brumata) during my thesis at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and later on fish behaviour at Adelaide University in Australia, where I spent long days watching juvenile fish in mesocosms respond to warming and acidification. I worked part-time at NIOO during my MSc (2018–2021), working in an animal ecology context with insect and and birds. I loved the questions, the fieldwork and being close to nature. 

But I also realised something: studying animals often means keeping them in captivity or killing them. And that didn’t sit well with me personally and also not with how I wanted to do science. Then I moved into the terrestrial ecology group at NIOO as a Research Assistant. I got introduced to plant-soil interactions and suddenly realised that plants are anything but passive. They shape their environment, interact with microbial communities and leave legacies in the soil that can determine what happens next. This meant I could study complex ecological processes, from plant-soil feedbacks to plant climate responses, without the same ethical trade-offs. Also, it turned out microbes run a lot more of the world than we give them credit for.

So when I started thinking about a PhD, I knew I wanted to continue with plant-soil interactions. But I also knew I wanted to go back to Australia. I had already spent time there during my MSc and really enjoyed the lifestyle, weather and amazing nature. So when the opportunity came up to study plant-soil feedbacks in a marine system, it felt like the perfect combination: terrestrial theory, but underwater. So, I moved to Sydney in 2021, completed my PhD (2021–2024) on the role of belowground microbes in seagrass responses to environmental stress and stayed on as a postdoc. These days, I'm still working on how microbial communities shape seagrass performance.

I guess, somewhere along the way, I swapped animals for plants and plants for microbes. Still not entirely sure how that happened, but I'm very much enjoying it!