Dr Jan Frederik Gogarten
Jan Gogarten is a wildlife disease ecologist who recently founded the Evolutionary Community Ecology Research Group at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Greifswald. He was elected to the Global Young Academy in 2023 and has showcased a commitment to increasing the diversity of perspectives active in academia. He has worked in two biodiversity hotspots in Uganda and the Ivory Coast for the last decade, with publications on a broad range of topics across the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, as well as microbiology and virology, highlighting his commitment to the transdisciplinarity needed for developing the One Health framework. The emergence of pathogens from ecosystems can have drastic consequences for humanity and at the same time, disease plays a critical role in regulating wildlife populations and their long-term conservation. Jan’s research seeks to build a basis for conservation policy aimed at living with biodiversity in a sustainable manner, both by understanding the processes that influence and maintain animal and microbial diversity in ecosystems, while developing strategies to understand and mitigate disease emergence in human and wildlife populations. To this end, he has developed an environmental DNA toolkit for studying hosts and pathogens at landscape scales, as well as non-invasive approaches for generating genomic data from hosts and their pathogens.
Jan Gogarten is broadly interested in health topics and especially in the factors influencing the composition of communities of hosts across landscapes, but also the communities of microorganisms within these hosts. He combines these types of data provides to provide insights into disease emergence and the transmission process between hosts and species, particularly coupling this with a phylogenetic scaffolding. He often works with wild non-human primates and utilizes a diverse molecular toolkit including metabarcoding, environmental DNA, and hybridization capture.
Jan studied Biology and Anthropology at McGill in Canada and went on to a master’s degree in Biological Anthropology at Stony Brook. He completed his PhD in Biology at McGill in 2017 with Drs. Jonathan Davies and Colin Chapman. During his PhD he was affiliated with the RKI and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology and worked closely with the Tai Chimpanzee Project and Drs. Roman Wittig, Fabian Leendertz, and Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer. He went on to a postdoc position at Columbia University working with Drs. Thomas Briese and Ian Lipkin, followed by a postdoc at the RKI as part of the DFG research group ‘Sociality and Health in Primates’ exploring the interplay of sociality and microbial diversity working with Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer.
