I am interested in engineering microbial communities to perform industrially, medically, and environmentally useful tasks such as conversion of plant biomass to biofuel and bioremediation.  Coordinating population level interactions and relative abundance of species within these communities is a fundamental challenge within the field.  My dissertation research focuses on using regulated temperature changes as a tool to modulate growth rates and therefore relative abundance of species within a microbial co-culture.  

•     Mathematical modeling: I am developing a mathematical model based on the Lotka-Volterra model of interspecific competition in order to predict population dynamics in response to temperature changes.  Eventually this model will be used to predict temperatures and time intervals which will maintain desired relative abundance of species within a microbial community.
•     Laboratory approaches: I use experimental microbial co-cultures to verify predictions made by our model and to explore species interactions and adaptations between community species.