Microbial Community Ecology in the Human Mouth

We share our bodies with a lot of bacteria. From both cellular and genetic perspectives, “our” bodies are more bacterial than human. My research focuses on human-associated bacterial communities from an ecological perspective, mainly how they interact with each other but also how they interact with their environment (the human), and the rules by which these interactions can change over time.

The oral cavity is a great system to study microbial ecology and symbioses, with communities that are both diverse and complex. And, it’s a fluid environment, so while studying a topic vital to human health, my work developing methods and conceptual frameworks applicable to the sometimes harder-to-study marine environment, another critical bacterial ecosystem I am interested in.

To study these communities, I use primarily sequence-based approaches and bioinformatic approaches to understand the resulting big data. As such I am interested in the development and application of cutting-edge bioinformatic and statistical methods to real-world microbiological questions, and intuitive ways for us humans to visualize such interconnected data.