About me and my research

I study the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities. I have a Ph.D in Biology from Indiana University Bloomington where I was a member of the Lennon Lab and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Garud Lab. I am currently a fellow in the Quantitative Ecology and Evolution Group at The Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) where I am advised by Dr. Jacopo Grilli. While I was trained as a biologist, during my Ph.D. I became inspired by the ongoing physics-driven transformation of microbial ecology and evolution and made the deliberate choice to use the postdoc stage to build a statistical physicist’s intuition and understanding of microbial communities. By applying principles from statistical physics, I believe that biologists can readily adopt a wholly quantitative and predictive framework that is capable of welding dynamic models of measurable quantities to high-throughput experiments.

My research can be coarse-grained into the following efforts:

• Investigating macroecological patterns in microbial communities through the development of minimal mathematical models.

• Determining the susceptibility and invariance of macroecological laws under experimental manipulation.

• Characterizing the ecological and evolutionary consequences of life-history strategies that permit the maintenance of microbial life in resource-limited environments.

These efforts are unified by the following approach: that by coupling experimental/observational data with intuitive mathematical models containing a low number of free parameters, we can gain a greater predictive understanding of microbial life. At present, I primarily use computational and mathematical tools to perform my research, though I have considerable wet lab experience and have performed field research in temperate and tropical terrestrial environments.

In my free time I enjoy making gnocchi, powerlifting, swimming, reading Italo Calvino and Emil Cioran, and car repair.