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.
Korin Albert
Korin Albert is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program. She is currently conducting her dissertation research under Dr. David Sela in UMass Amherst’s Department of Food Science who studies the relationship between mothers, the infant gut microbiome, and human milk. Korin’s research is focused on the coevolution between host dietary components and symbiotic Bifidobacterium species in the lower digestive tract.
Posts by Korin Albert
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
Barak Dror
PhD Student in the Eddie Cytryn Lab, at the Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences, Agricultural Research Organization, Hebrew U of Jerusalem, Israel.
Personal website: BarakDror.com
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
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
Zehra Tüzün Güvener
Tüzün is currently engaged in Freelance Consulting leveraging her expertise in strain engineering to engage in short-term or long-term consulting projects. She holds a Ph.D. in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She worked in academic research laboratories for over 15 years and recently pivoted to biotech. Her academic work focused on the ability of bacteria to sense and response their environment, cyclic-di-GMP metabolism and genetic factors contributing to biofilm formation. As a Project Scientist at UC Berkeley, she studied a low complexity model gut microbiome from the fruit fly gut to better understand dynamics of microbial interactions in the community with success in developing methods for chemical screens and genome editing of natural isolates.
Tüzün’s LinkedIn page
Posts by Tüzün Güvener
Tiffany Hsu
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
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
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
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
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
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
Ashok Kumar Sharma
Ashok Kumar Sharma is working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Here, his prime focus is to elucidate the host-microbe interactions using multi-omics approaches. Before joining here, he completed his Ph.D. in the year 2017 and the title of his Ph.D. work was the “Development of computational models and algorithms for designing of novel microbiome-based therapeutics”. During his Ph.D. project, he has become an independent programmer and written several codes using Perl and R. With his programming skills and experience in machine-learning, he has developed following computational methods for efficient analysis of genomic and metagenomic data.
Tina Šilović
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
Svetlana Ugarcina Perovic
Svetlana Ugarcina Perovic is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at UCIBIO/REQUIMTE (University of Porto), from 2016 in the Research Group of Dr Luisa Peixe, that is dedicated to investigating ecology and evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria in different ecological niches. She holds a B.S. in Environmental Science and a Ph.D. in Environmental Microbiology from University of Novi Sad (Serbia). Her postdoctoral work at University of Glasgow (2014) and University of Porto (2015) focused on drinking water microbiome in distribution systems. Her current research interests include capturing the diversity and exploring the role of urinary microbiota in women health and disease. She is an organizing committee member of the MicroMundo@UPorto, a service-learning project for education in microbiology and antimicrobial resistance awareness.
Twitter: @svetlana_up
Posts by Svetlana Ugarcina Perovic
Alyson Yee
Alyson is an MD/PhD student in Jack Gilbert’s lab at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She is interested in the interplay between the human microbiome in early life, the developing immune system, and long term health outcomes.
Alyson’s LinkedIn profile
Twitter: @yee_alyson
Posts by Alyson Yee
Past members:
Jennifer Barrell – 4 posts
Kristen Farley – 2 posts
Andrew Forgie – 1 post
Alyaa Mahmoud – 4 posts
Galit Meshulam-Simon – 7 posts
Mohammed Nabil Quraishi – 4 posts
Vinícius Salazar – 12 posts
Garrett Wilson – 3 posts
