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 marine mass mortalities and their drivers.

DCIM110GOPRO

Outside of work I am passionate about understanding perspectives of the human experience around the world, understanding variance across multiple axes, and sports involving water (swimming, water polo, hockey). I’m normally in the water somewhere.