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Lake Mendota at sunset, with a sailboat in the foreground

Microbial Ecology & Evolution

Headshot of Robin Rohwer

Robin Rohwer

Postdoctoral Fellow

The University of Texas at Austin

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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.

Education

PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison

Environmental Chemistry and Technology

Advisor: Katherine D. McMahon

Thesis: Temporal and taxonomic scales of change in freshwater microbial communities

BA Oberlin College

Biochemistry

Advisor: Robert Q. Thompson

Thesis: An HPLC-MS method for determining Oberlin student exposure to bisphenol A from polycarbonate cups and water bottles

Experience

The University of Texas at Austin

Research Fellow

Advisor: Brett Baker

Topic: Bacterial ecology and evolution in natural ecosystems

The University of Texas at Austin

NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology

Advisor: Brett Baker

Topic: Ecology and evolution in a 20-year 500-sample metagenome time series

DOE Joint Genome Institute

NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology

Advisor: Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh

Topic: Ecology and evolution in a 20-year 500-sample metagenome time series

The Pennsylvania State University

Research Technologist

Advisor: B. Tracy Nixon

Topic: Mechanism of fungal cellulases

Martek Biosciences Corporation, LLC

Research Associate

Advisor: Wei Wang-Nolan

Topic: Developing DHA-fortified dairy products

In the News

  • Collecting samples gets harder when there's a foot of ice between you and the water -- watch this video to see how it's done

  • Watch this video to go behind the scenes of prepping and extracting >1,000 samples for DNA sequencing

  • Listen to this fabulous Genome Insider Podcast about the creation of my 20-year metagenome dataset 

  • Check out this WIRED article that mentions my work on zebra mussels and cyanotoxins

  • Listen to my 15 min radio interview about invasions in Lake Mendota: Madison's WORT 89.9 FM 

  • Read press for an overview of my PNAS paper: NSF news, Phys.org, UW-Madison newsWater Blogged

  • To my great surprise, I made a viral tweet! Long-term data, phenology, global change, data vis, and my mom- 2 million eyes on all my favorite things :)

  • This beautifully written cover story in Grow Magazine describes my early work on Lake Mendota, along with some behind-the-scenes of how a "lake junkie" visualizes bacteria

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