Student projects

Open student projects

VOLT is looking for curious and dedicated MSc students in biology, environmental sciences, geosciences, and climate change (or other study programmes) interested in conducting their thesis projects within a stimulating and collaborative research environment studying production and consumption of biogenic volatile compounds. When you join the VOLT centre of excellence, you become part of the team and can learn about many subjects not only from your own work, but also from fruitful discussions during lunch time and coffee time, and the various regular meetings like journal club breakfast and VOLT-all meeting where there are presentations over cake and coffee.

Projects

As an MSc student at VOLT you will be involved in one of the many on-going projects within our center. The specific project depends on your interests and may include quantification of fluxes of volatile compounds between ecosystems, plants and/or microorganisms and the atmosphere; quantification of volatile consumption by microorganisms; experiments unravelling how volatile compounds affect plants and microorganisms across species; and modelling of the biological processes and the impacts on climate.

You may gain hands-on experience with experiments involving plants/mosses, freshwater and marine systems, microorganisms, soils, and insight into the effects of climate change on ecosystem-volatile-atmosphere interactions. Methodologies may include PTR-ToF-MS and GC-MS, state-of-the-art instruments, to analyse volatiles, DNA- and RNA-based techniques to study complex microbial communities, and advanced tools for data analyses and ecosystem modelling. Fieldwork in Northern Scandinavia and Greenland may be possible at specific projects, as well as co-authoring papers with the results/analyses from your thesis.

MSc thesis projects at VOLT will be supervised by experienced scientists at VOLT, such as Center Director Professor Riikka Rinnan, Associate Professor Kathrin Rousk, Assistant Professor Jing Tang, Professor Lasse Riemann and Professor Anders Priemé or postdocs from VOLT.

Feel free to contact any of us to learn more about possibilities matching your educational background, curiosity, ambitions and thesis period.