Maria Prager

About me

I completed a PhD in animal ecology in 2010, at the University of Gothenburg. In my doctoral thesis, I explored the evolutionary origins of biodiversity, focusing on sexually selected signal traits, such as bright carotenoid coloration and elongated tails in birds. More specifically, I combined reflectance colorimetry, liquid chromatography (HPLC) and molecular systematics to test phylogenetic, mechanistic and ontogenetic explanations of evolutionary divergence in the African widowbirds and bishops (Euplectes spp.).

I am currently employed as a research engineer at DEEP, but am based at Scilifelab, Campus Solna, where I joined the Environmental Genomics group in 2018. Together with Anders Andersson and collaborators at Uppsala and Linnaeus University, I work with mobilizing metabarcoding and metagenomics data into Biodiversity Atlas Sweden, now part of the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI).