About Me:
As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Biomedical Sciences at UC Riverside, my research overall focuses on fungal communities and functional ecology in novel ecosystems, including pumice plains, drying lakebeds, and the lung mycobiome.
I am a soil microbial ecologist working at the interface of community ecology, biogeography, and mycology. My work broadly focuses on community responses to environmental perturbations, which feedback to influence plant and fungal community structure and ecosystem functioning.
I studied at the University of California, Irvine where I received my Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with an emphasis on Ecological Restoration and Fungi. My dissertation work in Kathleen Treseder’s Lab of Fungi, Ecosystems, and Global Change looked at the effects of ecosystem degradation on fungal community composition and function. For my dissertation research, I investigated whether restoration techniques affect fungi and I evaluated the efficacy of methods for restoring mycorrhizal fungal function within degraded landscapes.
Some of my newer projects on wind-driven (i.e., aeolian) microbiomes have recently been published in Frontiers in Microbiology and California Agriculture.