François Maillard

Welcome to my website. I am a researcher (Principal Investigator) in the Microbial Ecology Group at the Department of Biology, Lund University.

In 2018, I earned my Ph.D. in forest ecology at INRAE in France under the supervision of Marc Buée. I then spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, USA, mentored by Jonathan Schilling and Peter Kennedy. In 2022, I joined Lund University in Sweden to continue my work, and since 2024 I have been leading my own research programme as an independent PI.

My central research question is: how does climate change reshape the whole soil microbial community, and what does that mean for long-term soil carbon storage and nutrient availability in forests? I study forests as belowground ecosystems where bacteria and fungi interact with other members of the microbial food web, including key predators such as protists and nematodes, and where these interactions can shape how organic matter is decomposed, transformed, and stabilized.

To link microbial communities to ecosystem processes, I combine field and laboratory approaches. I use high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing (amplicon sequencing and metatranscriptomics) to track community composition and activity, quantitative stable isotope probing to identify which organisms are actively processing organic matter in situ, and targeted functional genomics in controlled experiments to connect microbial traits to genes and pathways. I also use soil microfluidic chips and complementary measurements of organic matter chemistry and process rates to connect mechanisms to outcomes in carbon and nutrient cycling. My goal is to turn community-level and trait-level microbial information into process understanding that can improve predictions of forest carbon and nutrient dynamics under climate change.