I am generally interested in the assembly and persistence of microbial communities in the environment. I use a number of approaches to better understand community level responses to environmental change, microbial immigration and dispersal, and strain-specific rapid evolution via horizontal gene transfer. Most of my dissertation work has focused on one mechanism of horizontal gene transfer known as natural transformation, which involves the transformation and integration of extracellular DNA (eDNA). I have specifically focused on the ecological factors that promote the release of extracellular DNA, the rates of transformation in heterogeneous environments, as well as more fundamental questions about the maintenance of transferred genes and their effect on host fitness.
