I studied mycology (BSc 1995; MSc 1998) and plant ecology (PhD 2004) at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and undertook Marie Curie postdoctoral studies (2006–2008) at the Scottish Crop Research Institute (now The James Hutton Institute), UK. During these early years I was looking into fine-scale patterns of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and was busy developing a high throughput sequencing approach for this. Out of curiosity, I started compiling DNA sequence and biogeographic data of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi worldwide, which yielded the virtual taxon (VT) concept for describing molecular species of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, and generated the public database MaarjAM, continuously in use for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal identification and ecological research. Thereon, I have been addressing plant and fungal interactions, from the community ecology and biogeography perspectives, both at local and global scales, and in natural and anthropogenic habitats.

Currently, I am the Director of the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Professor in Molecular Ecology and head of Soil Ecology Workgroup in the Department of Botany, University of Tartu.

In 2016, I received the Estonian National Award in Research (as a member of the team, head Prof. Martin Zobel) in geological and biological sciences for a series of studies on ‘Factors influencing plant and fungal diversity and their interactions’.

My current research focuses on soil health in (not only) anthropogenic systems and aims to disentangle the roles of micro-organisms in greenhouse gas emission patterns.

Maarja joined New Phytologist as an Editor in 2013.

Read her profile in New Phytologist 

Watch our interview with Maarja