Sharath Chandra Thota is a first-year PhD student at CIIMAR, holding a Master’s in Biology of Extreme Environments from Italy and a Master’s in Biotechnology from India. Passionate about extreme environments and their microbes, his research is supervised by Irina Gorodetskaya and Catarina Megalhaes, funded by an AIR Center grant. He explores atmospheric rivers’ role in extreme temperatures and precipitation and their potential effect on microbial biodiversity on the Antarctic Peninsula. Experienced with fungi, bacteria, viruses, haptophytes, and diatoms, he also evaluated SARS-CoV-2 in the air during COVID-19. His past research includes studies on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance and Svalbard permafrost microbial diversity.
