About Me
I was born and raised in the vastness of the Great Plains of Kansas where I became deeply accustomed to the patchwork fields of grain that characterize the flyover state. Hidden in the flat landscape are the remnants of the once great ocean that filled the Great Plains which left behind fossils I was determined to find as a child. I went so far as to pretend I had National Geographic filming my excavations of the ancient fossils (buried dog bones) in my backyard. The same oceanic-like vastness also permits an unimpeded view of the night sky and Milky Way Galaxy where I could dream of space-travel across alien worlds. These experiences end in only one way, a budding nerd. I became enamored with shows like Star Trek not just for their exploration of the universe, but of the human condition and justice.
An interest in racial justice led me down a detour to the world of law where I interned for a district court judge and attorney prosecuting murder cases. I envisioned leveraging a law career to advocate for those subjected to injustices in the judicial system. However, a microbiology course and exceptional advisor in the McNair Scholar’s Program during my time at the University of Kansas pulled me back to my first intellectual love of science. Microbiology showed me that Star Trek was fundamentally flawed in one way: space is most certainly not the final frontier. In fact, a handful of Kansas soil magnified 400x reveals an entire cosmos of ecology and evolution that needs little jet fuel to find. As an undergraduate, I was inspired by the work of so many scientists from Pardis Sabeti to George Washington Carver to John Snow. Their work across epidemiology and agriculture felt fundamentally necessary and equally frightening as I came to understand the fragility of human systems. Then, as a graduate student, another round of inspiring scientists in my life, namely Nicole Gerardo, Hassan Salem and Aileen Berasategui, showed me the extraordinary value of evolutionary thinking applied to disease systems. From predictive capacity to deeper biological understanding, I have been enthralled with fungi, host-parasite disease ecology, and evolution since.
If microbiology opened another universe, my time in the McNair Scholars program was my spaceship. It was there I found my community of individuals who understand the challenges of first-gen, low-income, underrepresented scholars. It was there I truly believed, for the first time, that a career in science was possible. This time also allowed me to see that my interests in racial equity could be pursued beyond a law career.
My first scientific love will forever be Chlamydia. I worked with Scott Hefty at the University of Kansas to (unsuccessfully) develop a transposon-based mutagenesis system as a means to map the unexplored regions of the genome and, subsequently, identify mechanisms of pathogenesis. While technically a failure, the experience only boosted my commitment to continue research on disease systems.
Host-pathogen interactions, ultimately, have been my gateway drug to fungi. One simple experiment from my time as a summer research student in Dr. Nicole Grardo’s lab set me on the path of fungi:
These pictures show a pink Hypocrealean fungus (think: Ophiocordyceps, Trichoderma) , Sympodiorosea, selectively growing towards a basidiomycete cultivar of the fungus-growing ants. In the top, Sympodiorosea finds and successfully infects the cultivar while a somewhat distantly related host is able to defend itself in the second panel of photos. The classical zone of inhibition has haunted and guided my research since.
Fungi, through their dynamic lifestyles, beautiful phenotypic diversity, and exceptional ability as biochemists have completely colonized my brain. It is likely only a matter of time before the fungus sprouts from my skull, but in the meantime, I am their humble servant. From extracting natural products from cultivated fungi of ants to cultivating my own Lion’s Mane, I am well and truly gone to fungi.
Currently, I work with Dr. Nicole Gerardo and Dr. Tim Read to apply a phylo- and comparative genomics approach to understand the evolution of fungi cultivated by fungus-growing ant agriculture as well as a another fungus, Sympodiorosea, that acts a crop pest of the ants.
