Mr Andrew Bissett

Andrew is the group leader of the Marine Observations and Analytics in CSIRO's Sustainable Marine Futures program. His research utilises metagenomics analysis tools to improve our understanding of microbial biodiversity patterns and dynamics and their effects on ecosystem processes in a range of environments (soil, water, organismal microbiomes). Andrew also has research interests in the application of eDNA to research in ecology and ecosystem monitoring, data and metadata management and standards and bioinformatics analysis of sequence data.

Andrew completed his PhD at UTAS investigating effects of Salmon farming on sediment microbiological processes, after which he completed a postdoctoral fellowship and the Max Plank Institute for Marine Microbiology, in Bremen, Germany. He returned to Australia as an OCE post-doctoral fellow with CSIRO (Plant Industries), before moving to O&A in 2017.

Andrew's research interests include all aspects of microbial ecology, particularly relationships between microbial identity and function. These interests include the roles of microbial communities in the broader environment and also as members of higher organisms’ microbiomes. To investigate microbial communities and their functions Andrew employs primarily culture independent methods reliant on amplicon based and amplicon free metagenomic sequencing, functional gene microarrays and biogeochemical methods.