Mária Džunková was born in Slovakia and pursued her university studies at the University of Life Sciences in Prague, Czechia (2005–2010). During her master’s studies, she worked as a laboratory technician in DNA sequencing at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Then she moved to Spain for her PhD studies at the University of Valencia (2010-2016) which included a research stay at the Harvard University (2014). After defending her PhD thesis entitled ”Metagenomics of the Human Gut Microbiome Directed by the Flow Cytometry” she got a postdoc position at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University of Queensland (2016-2019), where she developed “single-cell viral tagging” method for exploring the phage host range without the need for microbial culturing and applied it to the human gut microbiome. She was invited to a second postdoc (2016-2021) at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) to continue with her microbial single-cell genomics techniques. In California she studied the relationships between the phages and bacteria in environmental samples and explored new targeted single-cell genomics techniques for discovering symbiotic microbes of the marine soft-bodied animals capable of producing bioactive molecules. She joined the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio) in December 2021 with funding from the Valencian regional government for promoting research excellence to set up her Microbial Single-Cell Genomics research group. By applying single-cell techniques, her team identifies novel metabolic pathways and interactions that redefine our understanding of microbial ecology and evolution.

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Contact: maria.dzunkova (at) uv.es