Research

I am a molecular ecologist studying how global change is restructuring the molecular and ecological mechanisms shaping microbial and plant-microbe interactions. My research combines ecology, evolution, and genomics to understand the why, when, and how of climate change and environmental stress disrupting community and ecosystem resilience. Below, please find brief descriptions of two major foci in my research.

Community Structure Under Global Change

My research focuses on how microbial communities may be susceptible to environmental change. I have explored how water/nutrient stress gradients in natural ecosystems reduce stabilizing properties of community networks, suggesting increasing stress under climate change will push many microbiomes to more stressful and less stable baselines. I have also identified a new, common principle of bacterial ecology and evolution in which some of the most potentially influential bacterial taxa may be especially sensitive to environmental change due to highly restrictive environmental requirements.

Genetics of Plant-Microbe Interactions

I also explore the genetic basis of why and how plant-microbe interactions vary in different environments. I often use the symbiosis between plants and the fungal mutualist arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi as a model system for building molecular frameworks underlying environment-driven shifts in species interactions. I have explored how gene family expansions are essential to building genetic complexity plants use to regulate their interactions with fungal mutualists in stressful environments, demonstrating how the evolution of genetic complexity creates the molecular tools necessary for context-dependent regulation. I am currently building cross-species co-expression networks between plants and mycorrhizal fungi to understand how environmental stress reshapes how plants regulate fungi and vice-versa.