Research

“It is a good thing for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.”

– Konrad Lorenz

Tip: You could split my research interests into Agriculture, Forests, or Microbes, and you can learn more about my specific research programs, and read my papers, in each area by clicking the words above.

Overall, my primary interest is in the complex context-dependent interplay between plants and soils. In particular, I am interested in how the belowground plant-associated microbiome mediates environmental pressure on both the organism and community scale.

I am powerfully motivated to consider issues of both food safety and environmental sustainability in the context of our changing climate. I conduct experimental research designed to quantify organism-level mechanistic connections underlying plant-soil dynamics. I also pursue theoretical work intended to apply these mechanistic first principles to both A) predict broader community-level patterns at greater scales and B) suggest amendments or considerations for ecosystem conservation and agricultural management.

In my PhD research, I have largely focused on mitigating nutrient pollution from historically fertilized ranchlands via the implementation of ‘vegetation harvest strips,’ a form of phytoremediation biotechnology designed to mitigate the loss of legacy phosphorus from soils. I’ve also had the opportunity to implement innovative new techniques to track and study the movement of both carbon and phosphorus underground.

Previously, I was a fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where I studied how the interplay of mutualist and pathogen fungi in soils impacts large-scale patterns of diversity in the tropical rainforest.

Before Panama, I had the great privilege to be supported by both the Becky Colvin Memorial Award and the (formerly) Princeton Environmental Institute Environmental Scholar Program to conduct research in equatorial Kenya. There, I used VHF tracking to study animal movement and drone technology to study landscape-level change brought on by pastoral grazing.