Oceans · Microbes · Data
I'm a Postdoctoral Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution interested in understanding the complex dynamics between marine micoorganisms and global biogeochemical cycles.
I study how the availability of different chemical elements influences the geographic distribution and evolution of microbial communities, and conversely, how marine microorganisms biochemically transform compounds thereby influencing their global cycling. Most of my work has focused on the toxin Arsenic, as well as the nutrients Phosphorus and Nitrogen.
I utilize multiple techniques to study these broad interactions between microbes and the marine environment, including genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and data science. Please see the Projects section below for more information about some of my research and data projects.
METATRYP is a software package designed to assess the taxonomic specificity of short tryptic peptides used for environmental proteomics analysis. Our latest publication with METATRYP v 2.0 applies the tool for marine microbial community assessment as well as demonstrates applications for COVID-19 identification.
The Ocean Protein Portal is an online visualization platform for users to explore the presence of marine microbial proteins throughout the world's oceans. This tool is an open sharing platform for marine proteomic data facilitating research discovery and education
Oxygen Deficient Zones (ODZs) are regions of the pealgic ocean where water is naturally anoxic. These regions contain microbes which can respire alternative chemical compounds (they "breath" compounds other than elemental oxygen). Some of these microbes can respire arsenic comounds in order to gain energy. Arsenic respiration may have been important in early anoxic oceans on Earth and may provide a mechanism of cellular energy for potential micorbial life on exoplanetary bodies.
Semantically rich data can help make scientific data more discoverable, reusable, and interoperable. Semantic technologies descibe not only the individual pieces of data, but the relationships between the data in human and machine-readlable formats. Semantic technologies can help facilitate the discovery of previously unknown relationships among oceanographic data collections, hopefully resulting in a better understanding of the marine system.