Rosario Iacono

Dr. Rosario Iacono is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Soil Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ (since 2023). His work focuses on microbial diversity's role in ecosystem responses to climate change, sustainable agriculture strategies, and data-intensive ecological modeling using R/Python. He contributes to the Biodiversity Exploratories project, analyzing soil fungal communities along land-use gradients, and leads the Anthea project developing open-source seed varieties for vertical farming.

• Research Themes:
• Microbial diversity in agricultural systems
• Climate change impact on ecosystem resilience
• Land-use optimization via agrivoltaics and vertical farming
• Statistical modeling of ecological datasets

Scientific Affiliations: Member of International Mycorrhiza Society (2024) and Association for Vertical Farming (2023). Holds an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy for teaching expertise.

• Key Awards:
• EIT Food Innovator Fellowship
• Weinberg Campus Accelerator Program