MSc. Klára Judita Petrželková, Ph.D., is a researcher – primatologist who currently works at the Institute of Vertebrate Biology (within the research group Ecology of Primate Symbionts) and the Institute of Parasitology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and at the Liberec Zoo. She studied zoology at Masaryk University in Brno, where she began study bats, but she was always attracted to the study of primates. She began to study them in her first postdoctoral project, in which she dealt with the ecology of parasitic diseases in chimpanzees on the island of Rubondo in Tanzania. Currently, the research group study the relationships between hosts, symbionts and the environment and the diversity and transmission of parasites between primates and humans in African forest ecosystems, focusing in particular on the strongylid nematodes of apes and humans. Klara also studies how anthropogenic influences leading to the fragmentation of habitats and populations of wildlife and plants affect the community of prokaryotic and eukaryotic symbionts in African apes and researches the intestinal bacterioma of humans and primates, including the influence of food and intestinal bacterioma on cardiometabolic disease in human care. The results of research can find use in the protection of the health of both endangered primates and humans.
