Rate My Professor Mette Haubjerg Nicolaisen

Mette Haubjerg Nicolaisen serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, where she heads the Microbial Interactions research group within the Section for Microbial Ecology and Biotechnology. Her work centers on molecular microbial ecology, investigating the assembly, dynamics, and functional roles of microbial communities in soil, subsurface horizons, rhizospheres, and hyphospheres. Nicolaisen explores interactions between plants and microbes, as well as microbes and fungal hyphae, to understand mechanisms promoting plant growth, resilience to abiotic stresses like drought, and contributions to sustainable agriculture through microbial biotechnology.

Leading innovative projects, she directs INTERACT to decode wheat rhizobiome dynamics for enhanced resilience, Bac4Crop to engineer microbial consortia for climate-resilient maize production, Deep Frontier to characterize microbiomes in deep-rooted crops' rhizospheres and subsoils, Protective Microbiomes on plant pathogenic nematodes, and efforts targeting phage-bacterial interactions for biotechnological and therapeutic uses. Her research employs informed cultivation to isolate novel soil and rhizosphere bacteria, assesses environmental stressors on microbial inoculants, and examines cultivar-dependent microbial patterns linked to disease resistance. Key publications encompass "Biofilm formation by Pseudomonas putida KT2440 contributes to improve tomato drought stress resilience and priming for enhanced gene regulation" (2026), "Synthetic bacterial community colonizes wheat roots grown in soil and mimics the assembly pattern of a field community in a cultivar dependent manner" (2026), "NRPS gene dynamics in the wheat rhizoplane show increased proportion of viscosin NRPS genes of importance for root colonization during drought" (2025), "Pseudomonas taxonomic and functional microdiversity in the wheat rhizosphere is cultivar-dependent and links to disease resistance profile and root diameter" (2025), "Myxobacteria isolated from recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS): ecology and significance as off-flavor producers" (2025), "Soil microbiome interventions for carbon sequestration and climate mitigation" (2025), and "Circular nutrient management through slurry separation and pyrolysis: a field study" (2026). Nicolaisen's scholarship, with more than 3,500 citations, advances knowledge in plant-microbe interactions, microbiome engineering, and environmental microbiology.