Overview
I’m a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Professor Michelle O’Malley at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’m passionate about using the technology that nature itself has developed and honed over billions of years to make the world a better place, particularly through the study and engineering of microbes and microbial communities.
A list of my publications can be found here.
Research
As a researcher in the O’Malley lab, I employ both experimental and computational approaches to study two lines of research, unified by the common theme of understanding how the interactions between microbes in fibrolytic anaerobic microbiomes drive community composition and metabolic activity, and employing this knowledge to develop a framework for synthetic consortia that compartmentalize biomass degradation and value-added production of desired microbial metabolites.
To do this, I study a natural consortium that has evolved over millions of years to digest fibrous biomass with exceptional efficiency: the herbivore gut microbiome. Gut microbiomes across the animal kingdom are the densest, most populous, and most diverse microbial communities anywhere in or on their host, and play a crucial role in the degradation and fermentation of their host’s diet, which produces a variety of fatty acids, gases, and other metabolites, including nutrients essential to the host’s health. Herbivore gut microbiomes, particularly those of ruminants and other foregut fermenters, are home to a massive, complex community of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and protists that evolved together to degrade and digest the lignocellulose in plant secondary cell walls, and they carry out this process far more efficiently than any non-biological process humans have engineered for this purpose.