About

I am an expert in soil microbial ecology and biogeochemical cycling and am interested in questions related to how microbial activity and diversity impact soil and soil and plant health as well as geochemical cycling at the micro- to ecosystem-scale. Climate change and human-induced landscape modifications can greatly impact landscape biodiversity. At the soil microbial level, decreased diversity leads to decreased functional capacity to carry out normal biogeochemical cycling overall contributing to an imbalance that can impact ecosystem resiliency. Therefore, analogous to microbial diversity in the gut or in the plant rhizosphere contributing to host health, landscape biodiversity can also influence ‘ecosystem health’ and capacity to perform ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration.

I have currently just started a new position doing soil microbiome bioinformatics at Lawrence Livermore National Lab as a postdoctoral research associate with Dr. Jennifer Pett-Ridge and Steven Blazewicz. I am looking forward to using stable isotope probing to uncover what microbes are active and how they contribute to persistence of carbon in the soil.

My story:

Originally from Chicago, Illinois, I was transplanted to Tucson, AZ in high school and continuted on to receive my B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona in 2001. After graduation, I discovered a love for Microbial Ecology while working for an aquarium company in Los Angelas, CA where I studied ammonia- and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria to be used to prevent ‘new tank syndrome’ in fish tanks. With this new-found love, I returned to graduate school to study the role of microbes in plant health and metal(loid) cycling during revegetation of toxic mine tailings, and received my PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Arizona in 2017. Next, I went on to my first post-doc in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Arizona with Dr. Donata Vercelli to study the role of the gut microbiome and microbially-produced metabolites in protection from asthma.  

For my second postdoc, I worked with Dr. Malak Tfaily and Dr. Laura Meredith studying the effect of drought on the soil microbial ecology in the tropical rainforest and Biosphere 2. My focus is on integrating multi-omics datasets (i.e. metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, volatilomics, and metabolomics) to help understand how drought impacts soil microbial activity and metabolic pathways.