Otto Cordero

Otto Cordero will join the faculty in July 2015 as an assistant professor. He received a B.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Ecuador, an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University, and a PhD in Theoretical Biology also from Utrecht University. For his PhD dissertation Otto worked with Professor Paulien Hogeweg on the scaling laws that govern the evolution of genome size in microbes. Otto was an NWO (Dutch Scientific Council) Postdoctoral Fellow working with Martin Polz on the evolutionary ecology of marine bacteria. During this period Otto pursued a study of ecological and social interactions in wild populations of bacteria, and demonstrated the importance of these interactions in generating patterns of diversity and sustaining ecological function. In 2013 Otto was awarded the European Research Council Starting Grant (the most prestigious career award in Europe) to reconstruct and model networks of ecological interactions that form between heterotrophic microbes in the ocean. Since November 2013 Otto has been Assistant Professor at the ETH Zurich. The main goal of Otto’s lab is to develop the study of natural microbial communities as dynamical systems, using a combination of experimental and computational approaches.