Dr Jacqui Horswell, PhD

Senior Scientist
 

Jacqui is an Environmental Microbiologist at ESR and leads the FRST funded “Safe and Beneficial Use of Biosolids (Sewage Sludge) on Land” research programme.  Her research is focused around the function of microbial communities in soils.  Jacqui also has a keen interest in developing new forensic tools primarily focused around non-human DNA and  has pioneered forensic soil DNA profiling in New Zealand.   

Research Interests:

• survival and persistence of pathogens in the environment
• microbial ecology of soils, eg, determination of size and composition of soil microbial biomass using cultural and molecular biological techniques.
• soil biotechnology, specifically the use of luminescent based microbial marker and detection systems, eg, lux.
• application of environmental microbiology tools to forensics, eg, using human-associated microbial communities as identifiers.  

Related webpages:

Conference presentation abstracts

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Publications