Dr. Jule Freudenthal will be honored with the Karl-Gottlieb-Grell-Prize of the Society of Eukaryotic Microbiology (former German Society for Protozoology, DGP) for her dissertation “New approaches for investigating microbial food webs across ecosystems” at the 45th annual meeting in Prague 20. – 23. April 2026.
The Karl-Gottlieb-Grell-Prize is awarded for outstanding dissertations in the field of protistology, named after the German zoologist Karl Gottlieb Grell (1912–1994), a leading pioneer of modern protistology.
Dr. Jule Freudenthal has applied molecular approaches to assess and characterize microbial food webs and their diversity in different ecosystems with a focus on protists. Among numerous other studies, she has established a functional trait database for Amoebozoa and shown how trait-based analyses allow for a better ecological understanding of environmental sequence data. Her work on canopy microbiomes has shown how the co-exclusion of algae-fungi symbioses and bacteria-fungi drives tree species-specific differences and contributes significantly to our understanding of eukaryote interactions in the canopy, a hitherto neglected biome. With her work on Physiological diversity and adaptation of Rhizaria revealed by phylogenomics and comparative transcriptomics Dr. Jule Freudenthal gained deep insights in the diverse physiology of heterotrophic protists, even among closely related species.
She has published her pivotal results in seven contributions, including four first authorships, in renowned journals such as Microbiome and The ISME-J. She defended her dissertation on March 12th 2025, in Cologne.
Jule Freudenthal received funding within the project: “Continuing the deep molecular characterization of eukaryotic microorganisms´ diversity and community composition in forest soils and the canopy region across biomes using a multiple barcoding approach – micDiv II” headed by Prof. Dr. Michael Bonkowski, Prof. Dr. Kenneth Dumack, and Prof. Dr. Martin Schlegel in the SPP1991 Taxon-Omics priority programme, Phase 2, and now continues her scientific work in the University of Koblenz.
Congratulations to Dr. Jule Freudenthal (University of Koblenz) on winning the prestigious Grell Price!