Researcher Summary

I am a computational (micro)biologist interested in anything and everything related to microbial ecology and evolution. To gain insight on the ecology of unique organisms within a system, I use collections of genetic data from the environment.

A particular set of data I work with are called “metagenome assembled genomes", or MAGs for short. These are sets of genetic data that are meant to represent a single organism type. MAGS are useful for building a microbial inventory for an environment and for monitoring that environment for changes. MAGs are also extensively used for delineating deep branches of the tree of life. MAGs are not perfect though, and usually represent more than one organism. I am interested in how this imperfect data impacts our scientific inferences and how we can make our conclusions more robust to these limitations.