I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Microbiology, where I work in Dr. Rachel Whitaker’s lab on mobile genetic elements (MGEs) in the human gut. Very little is currently known about the gut mobilome (the sum of all the MGEs in the gut) because most MGEs are inactive at any given time. I am interested in developing new approaches to discover MGE diversity, as well as ways of organizing relationships between MGEs using sequence data. I primarily work on bacteria in the genus Bacteroides, the most common and abundant human gut symbiont. At the lab bench, I have set up genetic tools in Bacteroides species to characterize specific MGEs, including phages that are beneficial to their bacterial hosts. Given the importance of Bacteroides species to the gut microbiome, the phages infecting them may play large roles in modulating microbial activity in the human gut.
