Dr Benjamin Tatton

I’m a microbial molecular ecologist and bioinformatician at The Open University, as part of AstrobiologyOU, specialising in genome-resolved metagenomics of extreme environments and Mars analogues. My PhD focused on biogeochemical cycling in high-altitude Andean lakes. As a PDRA, I concentrate on studying the microbial ecology of Mars analogue environments, developing reproducible HPC pipelines for genome reconstruction, taxonomic and functional profiling, and ML-assisted analyses in R, Python, and Bash. I have led field campaigns in Argentina and participated in field work in Iceland. Additionally, I have presented and co-chaired sessions at EANA, ASB, and EPSC. My research interests centre on biogeochemical cycling in aquatic and paleolake environments, simulation studies, anaerobic metabolisms, astrobiology, planetary habitability, and integrating metagenomics with metabolomics.