Advisor: Karl Cottenie [1], Integrative Biology

Proposed co-advisor: Dirk Steinke [2]

The Cottenie lab will receive several 1000s of metabarcoding samples. While we have a pipeline to process the generated sequence data, we 1) want to compare different metabarcoding pipelines currently used in the literature, and 2) perform a sensitivity analysis on the different parameters, to ultimately provide guidelines for future data processing of new sequence data.

The ideal candidate for this project should 1) have experience coding in R, 2) be interested in biodiversity data and metabarcoding, and 3) be comfortable in a open-ended research project.

This project is suitable for one or two semesters. The student is required to occasionally be on-site.