Our research focus is on marine microbial ecology. Our emphasis is around microbial community analysis, including mechanisms driving the assembly and stability of marine microbial communities, as well as microbial functions in these communities. We are particularly interested in community members that play roles in the marine nitrogen cycle, especially in nitrogen fixation (diazotrophs). Our work has recently focused on microbial communities in biofilms and microbiomes of copepods, along with community variability in seawater in coastal and oceanic transects.
Our typical research approaches include amplicon sequencing-based community analyses, targeting the entire community or functional groups (especially, nitrogen fixers), quantitative PCR, metagenomics and genomics, cultivation, fluorescence microscopy, as well as stable isotope tracer based process rate measurements. We have recently added flow cytometry and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) micr0- and macroanalysis to our local tool box.