Alyssa Fischer

HES-SO-Geneva
Agronomy
Route de Presinge 150
CH-1254 Jussy
Email:

Research Interests

My PhD project is part of the “BiodivSol” project funded by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. The main objective of this project is to decipher the relationships between soil properties, soil microbial diversity and cropping practices to better understand the drivers of soil quality in arable lands. To this end, a field study will be carried out including around a 100 field sites in the Jura and the Swiss plateau. The work will focus on two scales of interest. At the plot scale, changes in microbial community structure and functions will be assessed according to a gradient of soil vulnerability and cropping practices intensity. In a second part, clod-scale investigations on the contribution of soil microbes to the quality of soil structure and the implication of labile organic carbon will be carried out. Through this study, I hope to contribute to establishing baselines for the biological quality of agricultural soils in Switzerland.
I am employed at HES-SO Geneva under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Boivin, and working in collaboration with FiBL (Frick) and ETH Zurich respectively under the supervision of Dr. Andreas Fliessbach and Dr. Martin Hartmann. Prof. Johan Six is the supervisor for my PhD thesis at ETH Zurich.

Working Experience

Since 2020 PhD candidate at HES-SO Geneva in the department of Agronomy
2018-2019 FiBL-Lausanne internship for the Master thesis Education
2017 – 2019 M.Sc. Biogeosciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
2014 – 2017 B.Sc. Environmental Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland