Marjana Westergren

Marjana Westergren holds a PhD in Forest Sciences from the University of Ljubljana and works as a senior research fellow at the Slovenian Forestry Institute in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Previously, she shortly worked as a research collaborator at the European Forest Institute (Barcelona, Spain) and as a collaborator at Bioversity International (Rome, Italy).

Marjana has conducted applied research to support the conservation and sustainable use of forest genetic resources. Her work has focussed on various topics in the general field of evolutionary biology, including the study of processes that explain the distribution of genetic diversity in forest trees, from gene flow to fine-scale spatial genetic structure, in the field of ecological genetics and genomics of local adaptation, and the development of a concept for forest genetic monitoring. 

She has published over 60 scientific and applied papers and book chapters. She also has a track record in coordinating international projects, e.g. Interreg Danube project REFOCuS, WP5 in H2020 project FORGENIUS, WP3 in HorizonEurope project OptFORESTS. She has active coordination functions in the international networks IUFRO, AFORGEN and EVOLTREE.