I am broadly interested in the evolution of beneficial symbioses.
The goal of my postdoctoral research is to examine how transmission mode affects the evolutionary trajectory of a protective bacterial symbiont, focusing on the fitness outcome and the genomic and transcriptomic changes in the bacterium, and how these changes in turn affect the host. Because microbes have considerable influence on their hosts, understanding how symbionts evolve will provide insight into the evolution of eukaryotes themselves and the diversity of multi-species interactions in nature.
