Our former MSc student John Collins (Master Bioinformatics and Systems Biology) has won the first prize of the KHMW Jong Talent Afstudeerprijzen voor Life Sciences 2025 for his thesis on

The Microbial Ecology of Biodegradable Plastics in the Wadden Sea: Implications for Life in the Ocean and in Space.

This project was done in collaboration with Prof Amaral-Zettler and her team at NIOZ. In this work, John studied the impact of environmental and biotic factors on microbes living on plastic surfaces in the ocean. He also spent some of his internship at the European Space Agency, where he worked on designing and applying microbial consortia to circularize plastic usage in biological life support systems. He has since moved to a PhD position in Vancouver, Canada.

Well done and good luck, John!