I am a molecular ecologist with a range of research interests covering microbial community function and their involvement in biogeochemical cycles, microbe/invertebrate interactions, and developing bioinformatic pipelines for the detection of invasive species. My PhD involved both traditional and DNA-based microbiology to investigate the persistence of human pathogens in estuarine sediments with the Sediment Ecology Research Group (SERG) at the University of St Andrews. I then completed a post-doc with SERG investigating biochemical selection pressures exerted on bacterial communities by the ecosystem engineering of estuarine infauna. Prior to SAMS I did a post-doc at Rhodes University in South Africa where I was researching endolithic bacteria that actively degrade calcium carbonate structures (e.g. shells, coral) on the rocky shore. I have also been involved in projects involving using sequencing technologies to investigate pathogenic bacteria on the gills of salmon, lung microbiota of TB patients, microbial communities of sands of the Atacama Desert, and the diet of King penguins.

At SAMS my research is focussing on the development of bioinformatic pipelines to predict the environmental status of infaunal communities from metabarcode sequence data.