Our intestinal microbial community is quickly evolving with us, following changes to modern lifestyles and even throughout our lifetimes. I aim to understand how horizontal gene transfer shapes interactions in the microbiota and the implications of this pervasive phenomenon for community properties relevant to human health (e.g. resilience of a healthy microbiota to perturbations). I identified a large conjugative plasmid that frequently transfers to multiple species within a person and mediates the formation of multi-species biofilms.

Mammals maintain stable body temperature largely independent of the temperature of their environment and even small deviations from optimal internal temperature can threaten their survival. Thermoregulation critically depends on the ability to sense deep body temperature by the intrinsically warm and cold-sensitive neurons in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus (POA). However, the precise physiological roles of the temperature-sensitive POA neurons and the molecular mechanisms responsible for their temperature sensitivity are poorly understood.

Is the sexual reproduction of a Eukaryotic adaption to reduce the probability of passing on genomes that have lost genes to DNA break mis-repair? or Why the Pachytene Checkpoint?

Osmoregulation and ion regulation are essential features for normal physiological functions in animals. Using integrative approaches to describe coordinated cellular and organ-level mechanisms with physiological traits, my research broadly examines fundamental features that allow invertebrate animals to adapt to fluctuating environmental conditions. My talk will focus on work examining the interplay of anthropogenic disturbances and ion regulation in two different arthropod groups, amphipods and mosquitoes.

One of the most important innovations in land plant evolution was the development of a vascular system (the set of tubes that moves water and nutrients through the body). These conducting tissues amplified mass flow rates by orders of magnitude, allowing plants to increase their photosynthetic capacity, grow larger, and alter aspects of the terrestrial ecosystem including carbon dioxide sequestration and increased oxygenation, in turn, profoundly affecting the course of evolution for life on land.