My recent work in the Gore Lab at MIT has focused on how environmental factors influence the structure of simple microbial communities. In particular, my research has focused on the effect of temperature on the competitive outcomes of bacteria, and how changes to temperature influence the assembly of microbial communities. Using a modified Lotka-Volterra competition model that incorporates how microbial growth rates are dependent on temperature, we demonstrated that slower-growing species should consistently be favored by higher temperatures. Counterintuitively, this prediction holds in any case where there is a consistent faster-growing and slower-growing species, even when the difference in the growth rates of the two species increases alongside temperature. We validated this prediction in a wide array of experimental competitions, and also demonstrated that an understanding of how pairwise competitive outcomes change with temperature is often sufficient to make predictions for three species communities. This sort of theoretical heuristic supplies context for the complex dynamics observed in metagenomic surveys, and provides a testable hypothesis for future work in natural systems.  

Modern humans spend the vast majority of their time in built environments, which has fundamentally altered the ways in which we acquire and develop our skin, gut, and respiratory microbiota. My graduate work in the Gilbert Lab (then at The University of Chicago) focused on how microbes are vectored through built environments across space and time.  I began this work with a citizen-science based study which demonstrated how profoundly the microbes on our skin influence the microbiota of our homes, and which showed that occupants could be matched to their residences through microbial similarity. I expanded on this work in a yearlong survey of the microbial communities associated with a newly opened hospital, which demonstrated that the bacteria in patient rooms consistently resembled the skin community of the current patient, with transfer occurring in both directions. This work led to an interest in using microbial communities for forensic purposes, and I was able to show that individuals could be matched to spaces they had recently occupied through microbial synchrony, and I expanded on this work to clarify how individual microbial signatures interact in public spaces such as college dormitories. I also focused specifically on the ecological interactions between bacteria and fungi on commonly used building materials, helping to clarify how competition and ecological succession influence the microbial ecology of built spaces beyond their interaction with the skin microbiome of occupants.  

I’ve been fortunate to work with a diverse set of collaborators to study microbial communities in a wide range of systems. In an ongoing collaboration with the Marcelino group at Northwestern, I’ve used network and phylogenomic-based methods to study interactions between corals and their obligate algal symbionts, and demonstrated that interaction networks can meaningfully predict bleaching risk in coral species which transmit symbionts to their offspring. I’ve also shown how sampling and evolutionary biases can confound our understanding of coral bleaching risk. In other work, I studied microbial community assembly in grapevines, in an invertebrate model for immune development, and in captive marine mammals. I’ve also helped demonstrate that normally innocuous microbial species can become pathogenic under environmental stress, and shown that microbial succession follows a predictable path during corpse decomposition.