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 bacteria occur at different times, and how their genomes change over time. This helps us understand what exactly the different bacteria do, in addition to answering basic questions about how ecological and evolutionary theory apply to microbial communities. My main 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 aquatic microbiomes as a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin.
In the News
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So pleased to see a shout-out from the Science Research Highlights section---this was especially exciting because my mom saw it in the print magazine first and told me about it!
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Read press describing my Nature Microbiology paper where I observed bacterial ecology and evolution in real-time: UT news, TACC news, HPC Wire, Water Blogged, Popular Mechanics, Madison Magazine, and (if you can read Arabic) on Al Jazeera!
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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
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Watch this video to go behind the scenes of prepping and extracting >1,000 samples for DNA sequencing
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Listen to the Genome Insider Podcast about the creation of my 20-year metagenome dataset
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Check out this WIRED article that mentions my work on zebra mussels and cyanotoxins
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Listen to 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 PNAS paper where I found that invasive species can disrupt the seasonal patterns of bacteria: NSF news, Phys.org, UW-Madison news, Water Blogged
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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 :)
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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
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
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