Our Team | Franziska Sandmeier

Franziska Sandmeier - Headshot

Franziska Sandmeier

Associate Professor

Biology

Respiratory Microbes, Disease Ecology, Ecoimmunology

Franziska Sandmeier is excited to help recruit and train MS students at CSUP who will be members of the BROADN community. We will work at an established field site on the Pueblo Chemical Depot, representative of relatively undisturbed short grass prairie and a rare sandsage-dominated prairie community. This area has a robust ornate box turtle population which we have been monitoring for several years. Given that turtles and tortoises often acquire pathogens of the respiratory tract, we will use this species to compare the microbiome of the soil, deep turtle overwintering burrows, the aerobiome, and turtle respiratory tracts. Our goal is to test hypotheses concerning the source of respiratory microbes and possible transmission among individuals.