I’m a marine scientist working in the Department of Microbiology at Cornell University in the tiny town to Ithaca, NY (nowhere near New York City…). I started my education at high school in Canberra, Australia, before doing an undergraduate degree in marine science at the University of Queensland. After my BS degree I completed an honors degree (which is more like a MS in the US) in the Department of Botany, UQ studying benthic microalgae and marine viruses (with Bill Dennison and Judy O’Neil). I moved to the US for a PhD in 2000 working with Jed Fuhrman at the University of Southern California. My PhD project examined the impact of viruses on bacterial community composition, although I also did a great deal of work mapping the biogeography of bacterial taxa around different habitats of the ocean. In 2005 I moved to a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working with Jon Zehr on marine diazotrophic (N-fixing) bacteria and community genomics/transcriptomics before coming to Cornell in 2009. My work since coming to Cornell has focused once again mainly on aquatic virology and the influence of viruses on keystone taxa and biogeochemically significant aquatic invertebrate zooplankton/meiofauna.

Outside of work I am passionate about understanding perspectives of the human experience around the world, understanding diversity across multiple axes, and ice hockey. I’m a goalie, which means plenty of bumps and bruises!