Dr. Stefan Thiele is a microbial ecologist at the University in Bergen, Norway, working on bacterial and archaeal communities in different Arctic environments using mainly sequencing-based methods. After his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Stefan conducted two postdocs at Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA, before returning to Germany and joining QIAGEN for one-and-a-half years. Besides microbial ecology, Stefan is interested in sustainability, especially in academic and lab environments. Consequently, he is currently conducting a second M.Sc. in Environmental Science at the FernUniversität Hagen.