Ingrid Sassenhagen has recently started as Research Engineer at SITES Erken Laboratory! Welcome to the SITES Community, Ingrid!
Ingrid is an aquatic ecologist and studies all things related to phytoplankton. During her PhD project at Lund University, she investigated dispersal patterns and local adaption in the freshwater raphidophyte Gonyostomum semen, the infamous Gubbslem. For the following postdoc positions, she moved to Texas and France, where she worked in the marine ecosystems of the Caribbean and the Southern Ocean. Back in Sweden, this time at Uppsala University, Ingrid worked again with freshwater phytoplankton and investigated fungal parasites that infect algal blooms.
She is excited about contributing to studies of plankton community responses to environmental change in the SITES AquaNet mesocosm facilities. She will help with coordinating the upcoming mesocosm experiments, which will run in parallel at SITES stations at Erken, Bolmen and Skogaryd. Ingrid will also help with the maintenance and installation of the sensors for the mesocosms, prepare materials and chemicals for the experiments, and analyze the resulting data. She is really looking forward to meeting all the other enthusiastic aquatic scientists that will be involved in the experiments. In her free time, she likes to dance salsa and swing, go swimming and sew clothes, but lately she has been spending a lot of time at various playgrounds with her toddler son.