Following the successful completion of her PhD in May, we are delighted to celebrate another major career milestone with Mourine Yegon. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has awarded her an Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship to support her project, Warming & Pollution Effects on Macroinvertebrate Ecology. As part of the fellowship, she will spend two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in Michelle Jackson's research group, before returning to Libor Závorka's SciFish group at WCL for a third year. Congratulations, Mourine, and we wish you every success!
Photos: ©weinfranz
On 17 June 2026, Katrin Attermeyer, leader of the CarboCrobe research group at WasserCluster Lunz, successfully delivered her habilitation lecture and accompanying student lecture at the University of Vienna. Her lecture, titled "Greenhouse Gas Dynamics and Organic Matter Transformations along the Aquatic Continuum", was the final academic requirement in the habilitation process and was positively evaluated, paving the way for her appointment as Privatdozentin in Aquatic Biogeochemistry.
The entire WCL team proudly congratulates Katrin on this significant achievement!
On 8 May 2026, Mourine Yegon successfully defended her PhD thesis, titled 'Linking Consumer–Resource Biodiversity to Leaf Litter Decomposition, Particulate Organic Matter Dynamics, and Fatty Acid Assimilation in Streams', in Lunz. Her scientific work was supervised by Wolfram Graf and Simon Vitecek from BOKU University and was conducted as part of a PhD fellowship at WasserCluster Lunz. Congratulations on this outstanding achievement, and for being such a great scientist and role model!
On 27 April 2026, Pratiksha Acharya successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of Vienna. The title of her dissertation was “The Influence of Resource and Consumer Diversity on the Quality and Microbial Processing of Fine-Grained Organic Material During Leaf Decomposition in Flowing Waters”.
Katrin Attermeyer supervised the doctoral fellowship in the Carbocrobe research group at WasserCluster Lunz.
We extend our warmest congratulations to this talented scientist and wish her all the best for her future career!
This week, the TRIDENT working group carried out its first Lenti-DNA sampling at Lake Lunz. As part of the eLTER long-term monitoring programme, aquatic eDNA samples will be analysed for fish, macroinvertebrates and diatoms in future. The sampling strategy for lakes is being optimised in the Lenti-DNA project using Lakes Lunz and Neusiedl as examples.
At the end of March, as part of an evaluation of our institute by an external panel of experts, we had the opportunity to spend three days presenting our work, our team and our vision in a reflective and inspiring manner. This time BOKU University organised the process. Many thanks to everyone involved; we look forward to seeing the results!
