Heroen Verbruggen

I am an algal biologist. Algae are foundational species in marine ecosystems and outstanding resources for sustainable aquaculture and biotechnology. Many aspects of the biology, genomics, ecology and evolution of algae that are essential to manage their populations and exploit them commercially are critically understudied. My research tackles this knowledge gap using state-of-art methods to understand how these organisms function, interact with each other and their environment, and have evolved. This leads me to work in different biological subdisciplines including biodiversity, genome biology, photophysiology, molecular phylogenetics and evolutionary biology. In our work on corals and their algal and bacterial symbionts, we integrate chemical imaging, meta-omics methods, metabolic modelling and experimental manipulations to better understand energy acquisition and metabolic exchanges. Data science and genomics are key skills in my group to facilitate this work. For more information on our research, please see https://hverbruggen.github.io/