Sheri got her Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography down the road at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program studying marine magnetotactic bacteria with Katrina Edwards. She moved to UC Berkeley for a postdoctoral position with Jill Banfield studying microbes that grow in much less pleasant environments, but which are a fascinating model system for the use of “omic” methods to understand microbial ecology and evolution. She started up a new lab at the Bay Paul Center in December 2009 and is now focusing on using new microbial model systems to understand the interaction between microbial ecology and evolution. Sheri also has an appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University and can accept graduate students through the MBL-Brown Joint Program.

Simmons CV

I began my academic career studying marine biology at the College of Charleston with an interest in biological oceanography, which led me to an interdisciplinary marine science master's program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. After working on the molecular ecology of coastal diatoms as part of my thesis, I landed a position at Vanderbilt, quite unrelated to marine biology or oceanography, working on the endosymbiotic Wolbachia bacteria. Here I studied the effects of this parasite on the reproductive cycles of arthropod hosts as well as horizontal gene transfer that occurs between different Wolbachia that simultaneously infect a single host. My interest in the Simmons lab lies in the use of next generation sequencing to more accurately and thoroughly explore genetic variation and function. I am particularly interested in the rate and scale of horizontal gene transfer within a community, as well as its implications for microbial adaptation to environmental changes.

Chafee CV

Emelia Anne DeForce is a post-doctoral researcher in the Simmons Lab. She is currently working on a phyllosphere study using tomato plants and Arabidopsis thaliana to examine microbial diversity, succession, colonization, and community assembly. During her graduate work at University of Massachusetts Boston under the direction of Michael Shiaris, Ph.D., she studied soil Archaea (specifically Thaumarchaeota) to determine diversity and potential function of thaumarchaea using the micro-ecosystem of the rhizosphere as well as land-use changes in the tropics.

Emelia enjoys being off at sea and has been on several research cruises during her graduate career which included two dives on ALVIN, the deep-sea submersible. She also enjoys traveling, SCUBA, board games, running, and surfing.

DeForce CV

How do microbes interact, migrate and colonize new habitats, which factors are determinant for the assembly of microbial communities and networks of functional genes, how do these complex systems evolve over time? Loïs is using plant leaves microbial communities as model systems to address these questions using high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies.

Loïs graduated from the University of Ghent (Belgium), at the Lab for Microbial Ecology and Technology (LabMET). During his PhD, he worked on the ecology of microbial communities thriving in deep-sea cold seep ecosystems.

Maignien CV