I’m currently a Marie Curie Fellow in the Rhizosphere group, having joined the team in 2025. I have a deep fascination with how plants and microbes cooperate, and my research is centered on understanding how these intimate cellular partnerships transformed over evolutionary time. Specifically, I’m working to decode the genetic adaptations that allowed plants to transition from primitive fixation threads to creating highly efficient, organelle-like symbiosomes.
To crack these evolutionary puzzles, I bridge the gap between wet-lab biology and data science. My toolkit is highly computational, and I’m passionate about integrating evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, and machine learning to analyze complex genomic data.
I’m always open to interdisciplinary collaborations. If you’d like to discuss comparative genomics, machine learning, or team up, reach out at: joel.klein@biology.ox.ac.uk
Joël’s fellowship is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK Government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.
Rhizosphere 