About

I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia 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 thus influencing global elemental 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, analytical chemistry, and data science. Please see the Projects section below for more information about some of my research and data projects.

Projects

ProteOMZ

Microbial enzymes are the biochemical machines responsible for driving major biogeochemical cycles. These enzymes support microbial life and have profound impacts on ecosystems and global climate. The ProteOMZ research expedition crossed ~5,000 km (about the distance from LA to NYC) and surveyed the proteins produced by marine microbial communities from the surface ocean to 1,250 m deep. We identified major trends relating to biogeochemical provinces, microbial consortial interactions, and taxonomic structure using metaproteomics and machine learning methods. Interactive exploration of the relative abundance of enzymes in ProteOMZ according to depth group.

METATRYP

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.

Ocean Protein Portal

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

Arsenic respiration in ODZs

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.

Oceanography in the Semantic Web

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.

CV