Microorganisms are central to sustaining life on this planet. My research focus is understanding how communities of these microbes respond to altered environment, and how that translates to shifts in ecosystem function.
Currently, I am a postdoc in the Bernhardt Lab at Duke University, where I study microbial community coalescence in aquatic and terrestrial systems. My research tackles crucial ecological questions associated with microbial community dynamics and assembly processes in a changing world. Additionally, my simple experimental setup has allowed me to disentangle the assembly mechanisms driving microbial community structure, thereby identifying environmentally sensitive and resistant microbial clades, as well as those most responsive to novel biotic interactions. In addition to my expertise as a microbial community ecologist, I have a wide breadth of biological knowledge, including: plant molecular systematics (Soltis Lab, Univ. of Florida), plant sciences (BS and MA, both in Botany), and in microbial ecology of both aquatic (Sogin Lab, Marine Biological Laboratory) and soil (Hawkes Lab, Univ. of Texas at Austin and Wallenstein Lab, Colorado State University) systems. |
Get In Touch.
I am open to forging new collaborations with fellow researchers who are curious
about the relationships between microbial community structure and function in diverse environments. I am also energetically available to describe my current experiments, and to discuss what it actually means to be a researcher, to fledgling scientists in primary and secondary schools within the Research Triangle. |