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I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Oregon State University and my research focuses on microbial ecology and host-microbe symbioses. I am interested in intermicrobial and host-microbe interactions with an emphasis on antagonism: competition, predation, parasitism, and pathogenicity. I combine wet-lab microbiology and genetics techniques, microscopy, and bioinformatic analyses to interrogate molecular determinants of specific interactions and evaluate their impact of microbiome structure and function.
I am currently a Simons Foundation and Life Sciences Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Vega Thurber Lab at OSU in Corvallis, OR. My research here explores interactions of two bacterial symbionts within coral microbiomes. The first aims to understand the ecology and molecular mechanisms of interaction for the ubiquitous yet poorly understood marine predatory bacterium, Halobacteriovorax. The second component of my work contributes to the Vega Thurber's Rickettsiales in Caribbean Acropora (RICA) project focused on the novel coral symbiont and parasite Aquarickettsia rohweri.
About Me
I earned my BS in Environmental Science from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. I went on to earn my PhD in Marine Sciences from UNC Chapel Hill in the Septer Lab where I studied bacterial competition in the Vibrio-Squid Symbiosis. I also spent time as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern University in the Distel Lab studying symbiont transmission in the wood-booring shipworm species complex Lyrodus pedicellatus.
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