Much like a factory production line, microbial communities divide the burden of metabolic “labor” over many species that take on different roles. Unlike the production line, however, the organization of microbial communities emerges from a complex interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes. My research program is about discovering how nature builds its metabolic factories.

I am currently Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Ecology & Evolution and Center for Physics of Evolving Systems. I am jointly mentored by Seppe Kuehn and Madhav Mani. I was a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017-2020. Prior to that, I completed a PhD in Applied Mathematics with Mary Silber, where I worked on pattern formation and geospatial data analysis relating to dryland ecology.

UPDATES

• October 2023 - Our paper on repurposing the mathematical framework of evolutionary fitness landscapes for the prediction of microbial community functions, led by Abby Skwara, is now out in Nature Ecology & Evolution. See also a wonderful commentary by Daniel Amor, and our tweetorial.
• June 2023 - At long last our preprint, led by amazing postdoc Kyle Crocker, is up on the bioRxiv; tweetorial.
• March 2023 - Check out our review in Phil T R Soc B on leveraging the phenomenon of global epistasis to make predictions.
• December 2022 - Read our Dispatch in Current Biology about recent work by the Newman Lab, which uncovers the two-faced nature of nitric oxide and its influence on biofilm structure.
• August 2022 - Just wrapped up a fun week at ISME18 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I gave a talk in the Engineering Microbial Communities session.
• March 2022 - Very proud of our paper on predicting community metabolism from gene content in microbial communities, which is now online at Cell! Check out a great commentary about our paper in Current Biology by Avi Flamholz and Dianne Newman.
• January 2022 - Our perspective piece on the structure-function problem in microbial communities is in press at iScience.