About the team

Since January 2017, the writing of the (nearly) daily Microbiome Digest blog posts has been done by a fantastic team of scientists from all over the world, who all share their love of microbiology and science communication here.

Alexandra Alexiev

Alexandra is a graduate student at CU Boulder (CO, USA) in Valerie McKenzie’s lab studying the skin microbiome of amphibians. She is interested in the broad concepts of host microbiome interactions and science communication.
Website: alexforscience.wordpress.com
Twitter: @AlexForScience
Posts by Alexandra Alexiev

Sarah Barnett Burns

Sarah is a graduate student at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) in Gustavo Turecki’s lab studying the human gut microbiome-brain axis in the context of depression and suicide. She is interested in the mechanisms of gut-brain communication and the impact of microbes on host gene regulation.

Sarah’s LinkedIn profile
Posts by Sara Barnett Burns

Maureen Berg

Maureen is a graduate student at UC Berkeley (CA, USA) working with C. elegans and plant microbiomes with Michael Shapira and Britt Koskella. She is interested in working with the team to be up to date on microbiome literature, and to gain skills in science communication.
LinkedIn profile of Maureen.
Posts by Maureen Berg

Juan Pablo Cardenas

JP is a Data Scientist at uBiome in Santiago, Chile. Before that, he did his PhD at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago, and a postdoc at the Fundación Ciencia Para la Vida. He is interested in bioinformatics and computational biology and microbial ecology.
Juan Pablo’s profile on Research Gate
Twitter: @jpca_chile
Posts by Juan Pablo Cardenas

Peter Graystock

Peter is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell (Ithaca, NY, USA) studying the transmission dynamics of microbes in pollinator communities and looking for links between pollinator parasites and their microbiomes.
Website: Graystock.info
Twitter: @PeterGraystock
Posts by Peter Graystock

Kiran Gurung

Screen Shot 2017-09-16 at 10.28.20 AM.png Kiran is a PhD student at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her work involves understanding the microbiome of Drosophila suzukii. Kiran is interested in host-microbe interactions and specifically in insect-endosymbionts, and science writing.
Twitter: @kirangurung29
Posts by Kiran Gurung

Tiffany Hsu

Screen Shot 2018-03-11 at 4.32.58 PM Tiffany is a graduate student in Curtis Huttenhower’s laboratory at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) (MA, USA). Her main projects involve characterizing horizontal gene transfer in the human microbiome, as well as looking at microbial composition on the Boston subways. She will be starting the APHL-CDC Bioinformatics Fellowship in the fall.
Tiffany’s LinkedIn profile
Twitter: @tyhsu389
Posts by Tiffany Hsu

Xin Huang

AAEAAQAAAAAAAAKdAAAAJDRmMGM4YjZiLTRjMTUtNDJiZi04MTg4LWY0NTIzMTgxOWFlYg.jpg Xin is a postdoc at Dr. Julie Segre’s lab at NIH’s National Human Genome Research Insitute in Bethesda (MD, USA). Before that, he did his PhD in the Armbruster Lab at Georgetown University. His current research topic is skin microbiome and the causal relationship between Staphylococcus aureus and eczema.
Xin’s LinkedIn profile
Posts by Xin Huang

Anitha Isaiah

Screen Shot 2017-10-04 at 11.10.01 AM.png Anitha is a graduate student at Texas A&M University. She graduated from Bharathiar University, India with a Master of Science in Microbiology in 2010. She then pursued a Master of Philosophy in Biomedical Technology from Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology, India. Following her passion for teaching, she worked as a lecturer in microbiology, Sree Sankara College, India. She started her PhD program at A&M’s Gastrointestinal laboratory in the spring of 2014. Her research interests include metagenomics and small animal gastrointestinal microbiome.
Anitha’s profile page at Texas A&M University
Posts by Anitha Isaiah

Amy Jacobson

Screen Shot 2017-09-09 at 7.19.49 PM.png Amy is a graduate student in Michael Fischbach’s lab at UCSF, San Francisco (CA, USA). Her research is focused on understanding how Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron interacts with the mammalian immune system mediated by the unique structure of its lipopolysaccharide. She is also very interested in science communication.
Amy’s LinkedIn profile
Posts by Amy Jacobson

Edward Messick

Screen Shot 2017-09-09 at 8.52.39 PM.png Edward is a recent graduate (MSc Bioinformatics, NJIT), and, before that, attended pharmacy school at Rutgers University before switching into CS/Cell Bio/Neuroscience for his undergraduate. He has worked for 4 years in the pharmaceutical industry/CRO’s. He currently works at GENEWIZ (NY, USA) and is interested in metagenomics and bioinformatics.
Edward’s LinkedIn profile
Posts by Edward Messick

Itumeleng Moroenyane

Screen Shot 2017-09-09 at 8.32.11 PM.png Itumeleng is a PhD candidate in the lab of Etienne Yergeau at INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier, Université du Québec, Canada. He is a microbial community ecologist with a keen interest in testing ecological theories of community assembly. His Ph.D. work focuses on understanding which assembly processes are delimiting the plant microbiome, as well as the evolutionary history of niche shifts and stability.
Itumeleng’s ResearchGate profile
Twitter: @Itumeleng_M
Posts by Itumeleng Moroenyane

Tina Šilović

Screen Shot 2017-09-09 at 8.48.02 PM.png Tina is a microbial ecologist studying marine microbes in the water column. She did a 2 year postdoc in France on the prototype of a new automated instrument designed to count marine bacteria in real time. In 2017, she moved back to Croatia, where she holds a research associate position at the Center for Marine Research at the Ruđer Bošković Institute. She is interested in microbial ecology and science communication.
Tina’s ResearchGate profile
Tina’s profile at the Ruđer Bošković Institute
Posts by Tina Silovic