Mailen Guerra Moreno (PhD student)
Mailen joined the Isotope Biogeoscience Research Group in the Climate and Environmental Physics Division at the University of Bern as a PhD student in October 2026, under the supervision of Prof. Eliza Harris. Her research is conducted in collaboration with the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group (SAE) at ETH Zurich, where she is supervised by Prof. Martin Hartmann.
Her PhD project is part of the SNSF-funded project “Constraining tropical wetland greenhouse gas production today and through time: Insights from Tumba-Ngiri-Maindombe, Democratic Republic of Congo (LacMai).” Her research focuses on the microbial communities and processes involved in CH4 and N2O cycling in the Tumba-Ngiri-Maindombe tropical wetland system, and their links to carbon and nitrogen cycling throughout the Holocene.
Mailen holds a Licenciate degree in Biological Sciences, specializing in Microbiology, from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina, which she completed in 2024. During her studies, she investigated arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in polluted urban wetlands. After graduating, she moved to Switzerland and joined the Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL) as an intern in the Rhizosphere Processes Group, where she worked on soil microbial communities and gained experience using functional marker genes to study microbial processes involved in carbon and nitrogen cycling. She later continued at WSL as a Research Assistant in the Phytopathology Group, working on molecular diagnostics of quarantine and regulated organisms and developing eDNA-based molecular monitoring tools for forest protection.
Outside work, Mailen enjoys dancing tango, photography, hiking, climbing, and spending time with friends.