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Experience
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2024 - present Postdoctoral Fellow
Brown University - Freilich Group, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Science
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2021 - 2024 Visiting Researcher
Joint Genome Institute - New Lineages of Life Group, JGI
Education
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2024 PhD
MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Biological Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering - Thesis Supervisors
- Dr. Harriet Alexander, WHOI
- Dr. Michael (Mick) J. Follows, MIT
- Thesis Title
- Decoding divergence in marine protistan communities - from strain diversity to basin biogeography
- Thesis Supervisors
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2019 Bachelor of Science
Virginia Tech - Biological Sciences
- Computer Science
- Computational Modeling and Data Analytics
- Minor - Mathematics
Honors and Awards
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2025 - Grants-in-Aid-of-Research, Phycological Society of America
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2023 - Graduate Teaching Award, MIT
- Early-Career Researcher Award, International Society for Evolutionary Protistology
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2022 - Grassle Fund Grant, MIT-WHOI Joint Program
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2020 - Ocean Venture Fund Grant, MIT-WHOI Joint Program
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2019 - DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
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2018 - Astronaut Scholarship
- Barry Goldwater Scholarship
Academic Interests
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Time-series and spatial community ecology of phytoplankton and other protists
- Maximizing insights from community- and investment-based -omics techniques
- Understanding mechnisms of phytoplankton nutrient acquisition strategies and interactive dynamics
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Combining modeling and -omics approaches
- Leveraging observations to improve ecosystem model projects of phytoplankton distributions
- Using physiological modeling to assimilate transcriptomic and proteomic data
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Improving taxonomic annotation of aquatic microbial eukaryotes
- EUKulele software tool
- Clustering approaches for taxonomic annotation
Other Interests
- Outreach: Classroom visits, education festivals, general marine science education
- Hobbies: Violin, scrapbooking, kayaking