RESEARCH:

Myriad marine species harbor a rich microbial community, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, fungi, and other eukaryotes on their surfaces and within their tissues. The association between host and microbes forms a dynamic functional entity known as a holobiont. The microbial partners play a crucial role in host health by producing bioactive compounds that are essential for normal morphology, development, and physiological acclimatization. Despite recent progress and increased interest, our understanding of how this network functions to maintain host health remains limited, primarily due to the high dimensionality of the data, with thousands of features across relatively few samples. My postdoctoral project aims to address this challenge though three main objectives: first, to reduce data dimensionality in order to uncover hidden ecological states; second, to map microbial interactions and reveal emergent functional relationships within the holobiont; and third, to forecast shifts in microbial community structure and identify keystone species that disproportionately influence host health. Working with well-studied seaweed species and through the developed methods, this research will provide a foundation for deeper empirical investigations into the contribution of microbes to host health and resilience.

BIO:

I received my Ph.D in microbiology, supervised by Dr. Simon Dittami and Dr. Catherine Leblanc, at the Biological Station of Roscoff (Brittany, France) by studying ecological and functional roles of the bacterial and eukaryotic communities associated with a brown seaweed. I am currently an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, closely working with Dr. Cathy Pfister (Ecology and Evolution department) and Dr. Claire Donnat (Statistics department) at the University of Chicago.