Microbial Ecology & Evolution

Close your eyes and imagine a lake: Red and orange ripples reflecting a sunset, or maybe the spray of breaking waves on your cheeks. Laughter and splashing and pool floats, or a silent night broken by the booms of expanding ice.

 

And now imagine a mystery: Water that teems with life, so small that we cannot see it, so diverse that we cannot count it, so interconnected that we cannot isolate it.

 

The natural microbes that live in lakes are central to ecosystem health, and I study how they interact and evolve over time. By sequencing the DNA in water samples, I identify which organisms occur at different times, and how their genomes change over time. This helps us understand what exactly the different microbes do, in addition to answering basic questions about how ecological and evolutionary theory apply to microbial communities. My study system is beautiful Lake Mendota (pictured), which is where I collected samples during my PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Now I continue to analyze these samples as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.