Growing up SCUBA diving in the Caribbean I spent hours observing and identifying any creature that crawled, swam, flew or hopped across my path. My love of marine ecology has taken me to complete field seasons from Maine to Malaysia to French Polynesia and ultimately back to the coral reefs of Panama. My research interests broadly lie in how ecological questions can be addressed using genetic tools. Specifically I enjoy exploring microbial community dynamics in coral host-pathogen systems, which I have worked on both in the Vollmer lab at Northeastern University and in the environmental engineering department at MIT.