Jean-Baptiste Ramond

Jean-Baptiste Ramond was educated in France and completed his PhD in Microbiology/Microbial Ecology in 2008. He then moved to South Africa for a postdoctoral research fellowship (2009-2012) at the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town) and a research fellowship at the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG) of the University of Pretoria (2013-2019). In 2019, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and held in parallel as an Extraordinary Lecturer of the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics & Microbiology of the University of Pretoria. His research aims at better understanding the adaptation of environmental microbial communities to extreme environmental conditions, particularly in the hyperarid Namib and Atacama deserts, as well as to climate change. This entails the study of the diversity and functional capacities of microbial communities from desert soils and refuge niches/microbial community hotspots, such as lithic and plant-associated environments. His works take advantage of both in situ and climate change-mimicking controlled experiments, ultimately aiming at improving climate change modelling with microbial data and hopefully to design microbial-based strategies that could be used to fight desertification.