2021 - 2024 - Postdoctoral Researcher in the Pawlowska lab at Cornell University
2016 - 2021 - Ph.D. student in the Smith lab at the University of Florida; Graduate Assistant to the UF Mycological Herbarium; Graduate Teaching Assistantship, UF Department of Plant Pathology
2012 - 2015 - Master's student in the White lab at Boise State University; Graduate Teaching Assistantship, BSU Department of Biological Sciences
Throughout my education, I have been involved in research on various groups of zygomycete fungi. Starting as an undergraduate at Boise State University, I worked with Dr. Merlin White on "gut fungi" (also known as trichomycetes, in phylum Zoopagomycota) which inhabit the digestive tract of various arthropods. My undergraduate work developed into a Master's thesis on the protist trichomycetes, which were traditionally classified within fungi, but were found to not be fungi using DNA sequencing. However, the protist trichomycetes have a very similar ecology and morphology, and even share the same individual hosts as fungal trichomycetes.
This work prepared me for my Ph.D. project at the University of Florida where I was involved with the large, collaborative, NSF project ZygoLife. My work focused on phylogenetics of the mycoparasitic genus Piptocephalis and phylogenomics of the subphylum Kickxellomycotina as well as investigating metabarcoding methods used for these fungi. I was also very fortunate to learn from one of the world experts on zygomycete fungi, Dr. Jerry Benny, who taught me many valuable culture techniques.
My Ph.D. efforts naturally led me to my next project as a postdoc with Dr. Teresa Pawlowska which was focused on Mucoromycota fungi and their bacterial endosymbionts. This was another large, collaborative project which involved partners at Oregon State University (Dr. Jessie Uehling) and North-West University in South Africa (Dr. Rasheed Adeleke). We collected hundreds of soils samples from Mediterranean and Desert biome sites in California as well as from Israel and locations is South Africa. This work is currently continuing in my lab.
