Christian Kost completed his PhD in 2006 in the group of Martin Heil at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. Subsequently, he joined the lab of Paul Rainey at the University of Auckland/ Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2009, he established the independent research group Experimental Ecology and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena. Since 2016, he is a full Professor of Ecology at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. His research focuses on the ecology and evolution of metabolite cross-feeding interactions among microorganisms. In this context, he is also interested in the genomic and physiological consequences of a synergistic coevolution, the evolutionary dynamics within microbial interaction networks, as well as aspects of bacterial multicellularity.
