Greetings! I’m currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in Marine and Environmental Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. I teach Biostatistics, Foundations of Ecological and Evolutionary Genomics, and Intro to Environmental, Social, and Biological Data. I also run the labs for Biostatistics, where students learn statistical programming in R.
Prior to starting at Northeastern, I was a postdoc at Harvard in their Data Science Initiative. My primary position was with the Baym Lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, where I studied microbial ecology using a variety of quantitative approaches. And, before that, I received my PhD in Freshwater and Marine Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I worked on microbiome community dynamics in Trina McMahon’s lab.
I’m broadly interested in using applied statistics, mathematical models, and experiments to study complex systems that cannot be deconstructed into separate components. Much of my research has investigated the population dynamics, community assembly, and evolutionary trajectories of microbes. During my PhD, I worked in a number of varied systems (biofilms, flies, zooplankton, aquatic bacteria) with the goal of understanding what drives the abundances of populations over time. I also enjoy the statistical challenges presented by the new kinds of data generated while studying microbial communities.
I believe that microbial ecology lies at the intersection of ecological theory, microbial systems, and applied statistics. My research touches on all these themes – during the course of applying ecological theory to microbial ecosystems, I often end up developing new statistical methods for these novel datasets.