News
Welcome Auja!
15 Apr 2026
We are delighted that Auja Bywater of Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences will be spending the next months with us.
Auja on LinkedIn:
I'll be spending the next few months in Germany researching the persistence of Salmonella on lettuce seeds in rockwool.
This work builds on my research at Penn State University, where I've discovered that Salmonella can persist during early seedling development in soilless systems. I'm excited to take this work international and dig deeper using Rb-TnSeq to identify genes that enable survival in these environments.
This wouldn't be possible without the Interdisciplinary Innovation Fellowship award from the One Health Microbiome Center at Penn State. I'm especially grateful to Grace Deitzler and Jasna Kovac for their support.
A huge thank you to Claudia Guldimann, Irene Esteban Cuesta, Jana Walter, Hélène Weber, Nicole Wildi and the team at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München for the warm welcome.
As controlled environment agriculture continues to expand globally, understanding microbial risks at the earliest stages of production is essential.