Femke van Beersum MSc

Femke van Beersum (1985) graduated in Spring 2015 as an aquatic ecologist at Wageningen University, specialized on freshwater ecosystems such as lakes, ponds and ditches. During her studies she was involved in research projects on among others the decomposition of particulate organic matter in ditches, the impact of pesticides on stream macrofauna and the effect of climate change on the functioning of bacteria in shallow lakes. She participated in many research projects in The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden for which she provided assistance in vegetation surveys, lake- and mesocosm samplings, general lab work and helped on the identification of freshwater macrofauna. Moreover she worked as a teaching assistant at Wageningen University, where she supervised bachelor- and master students in laboratory-, field- and computer practicals in courses on aquatic ecology and mathematics.

As Femke has a wide range of interests, after her graduation she joined the department of Microbial Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), starting as a laboratory assistant for Annelies Veraart and Paul Bodelier. By then, her main focus was on the functioning and ecology of the environmental relevant methane-oxidizing bacteria that have their natural habitat in among others wetland ecosystems. Thereby she got some basic understanding on methanotrophs and discovered that she really enjoys working in the lab!

During 2016 she got involved in the MicroZoo-project. In this project the microbiome of zoo- and phytoplankton and its role for the functioning of zooplankton was explored. In collaboration with a bunch of enthusiastic phd-students, post-docs and senior scientists, Femke developed techniques to disinfect zooplankton and phytoplankton, isolated bacteria related to zoo- and phytoplankton and set up and carried out laboratory and field experiments in The Netherlands, Denmark and Poland.

The project ended and so she decided to go to the Institute of Water and Wetland Research (Radboud University Nijmegen), to do a 3-month training program on the use of molecular techniques. Besides she offered phd-students helping hands on side-projects in the greenhouse. Fairly soon though she got offered a job at NIOO-KNAW again, with main focus being on chemistry. Since early 2019, she is part of the chemical laboratory within NIOO-KNAW. In this team she specializes on the chemical analysis of soil, sediment and plant material. For these analysis she uses the auto-analyser, element analyser, ICP-OES and LC-UV and collaborates with other colleague-research assistants, (phd-)students and (post-doctoral) researchers that work on adjacent fields at NIOO-KNAW or other organizations. To keep her field work skills up to date, she sometimes voluntarily joins trips to the Hoge Veluwe with colleagues from the Department of Animal Ecology. Femke very much enjoys learning new techniques and is looking forward to improve and perhaps develop some new methods :-)