About

Supporting diversity:

Diverse communities and ideas propel science forward to solve big problems in new and powerful ways. I will work to ensure that all students and researchers feel empowered to join in and contribute to scientific research. I am committed to advocating for and supporting individuals from all backgrounds and creeds, including race, religion, age, disability, nationality, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, and socio-economic background.

About me:

I am a marine community ecologist. I’m interested in understanding host-microbe interactions in our oceans and how these interactions support marine biodiversity and ecosystem function. I employ the use of field experimentation, microbiology, next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics to understand how complex communities respond to global change stressors.

More about my current position & training:

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Population Biology and the Evolution and Ecology Department of the University of California, Davis in Professor John Stachowicz’s lab. I am investigating eelgrass microbiome structure in response to eelgrass wasting disease across 32 degrees latitude in the northeastern Pacific. This is part of a collaborative group funded through NSF including computational biologists, geospatial scientists, and ecologists that are investigating drivers of eelgrass wasting disease. Our collaborators include: Timothy Hawthorne, Bo Yang, Drew Harvell, Lillian Aoki, Carla Gomes, Emmett Duffy, Ginny Eckert, Margot Hessing-Lewis, Hakai Institute, Kevin Hovel

I am a marine community ecologist by training. For my doctoral dissertation, I investigated how marine protected areas and overfishing affect coral defenses toward a globally distributed bleaching pathogen on tropical Pacific reefs. I received my Ph.D training under Professors Mark Hay and Frank Stewart at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to my Ph.D, I worked in a collaborative group at the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Under the guidance of Professors William Fenical and Paul Jensen, I investigated how microbes that live on the surfaces of plants and animals in the ocean may impact the health of their hosts by producing antibiotics toward marine pathogens.

My research on coral reef ecology was featured on Science Daily, and video footage can be found here. My Science Advances publication was selected for the popular science podcast, This Week in Microbiology filmed live, TWIM episode 208. I’m always looking for ways to improve my science communication and to get people excited about microbes and marine ecology, so if you’re interested in hearing more - please reach out!

Areas of interest: Marine Ecology, Microbial Ecology, Molecular Ecology, Ocean Science, Data Science & Informatics, Conservation Biology, Geospatial Science, diversity in STEM

Pronouns: she/her/hers