
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.
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
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
Martek Biosciences Corporation, LLC
News
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New publication out in mSystems! Led by Mirna Vázquez Rosas Landa: Exploring novel alkane-degradation pathways in uncultured bacteria from the North Atlantic Ocean
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Check out this WIRED article that mentions my work on zebra mussels and cyanotoxins!
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Check out my 15 min radio interview about invasions in Lake Mendota: Madison's WORT 89.9 FM
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Read press for an overview of my recent PNAS paper: NSF news, Phys.org, UW-Madison news, Water Blogged