I joined the Bromberg Lab as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow in 2019. I am interested in how microbial communities interact with the Earth system to regulate biogeochemical cycling. I am particularly interested in how we can leverage the growing amount of sequencing data to better model the vast complexity of environmental microbial systems. This challenge requires solutions on multiple themes, from data discovery and integration, to compute-efficient handling of massive amounts of sequencing data, to developing new modeling approaches that leverages the potential of this data.

As a postdoc in the Bromberg Lab, I am working with the ENIGMA team to investigate the relationship between microbes and their environment, on our modern Earth, throughout Earth’s history, and in potential environments on other planets. I am developing deep learning approaches to model the links between microbial communities and their geochemical and environmental context. I am building a deep learning architecture using all publicly available metagenomes to discover the functionally relevant features underlying all microbial communities, and leveraging these features to build models that can capture the complexity underlying microbial and environmental systems. I am also the lead author on the MetaSeek project (www.metaseek.cloud/), which facilitates sequencing data discovery and integration for the research community, and am working on an integration with the BrombergLab’s mi-faser tool.