Research

I am interested in how the genetic relationships between hosts and their associated microbiomes change across different environments.

I investigate topics related to:

  • Host-microbe-environment interactions
  • Host genetic influence on microbiome composition
  • Conservation in microbial niche space
  • Microbial functional redundancy across environments
  • Host evolutionary responses to microbes (and vice versa)

Skills & Experience

  • Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Genomics from Penn State University
  • Proficient programming skills in Python, R, and UNIX/bash environments
  • Demonstrated experience in modeling and analysis of genomic and microbial sequence data
  • Excellent knowledge of biological/statistical data analysis methods
  • Familiarity with Linux/Unix command line and high-performance computing environments
  • Excellent communication, teamwork, and organizational skills
  • Background in population/comparative genomics and microbial ecology

Software

  • Package Environments: Rstudio, conda, pip, jupyter-notebooks
  • Genome analysis/variant calling: vcftools, bcftools, IGV
  • Genome-wide association studies (GWAS): sommer, rrBLUP, statgenGWAS
  • Microbiome compositon analysis: phyloseq, microbiome
  • Microbiome sequence analysis: dada2, mothur, Qiime2
  • Modeling: base-r, sommer, sJSDM, Scikit-Learn, keras, scipy, pytorch, tensorflow
  • Phylogenetics: ape, phytools, phylogram, decipher,
  • Raw data processing: base-r, pandas, numpy, cutadapt, FastQC, dplyr, tidyr
  • Sequence alignment: BLAST, clustalx, muscle
  • Statistics, base-r, vegan
  • Visualizations: Matplotlib, ggplot, seaborn

Recent Publications

Sutherland, J., Bell, T., Trexler, R. V., Carlson, J. E., & Lasky, J. R. (2022). Host genomic influence on bacterial composition in the switchgrass rhizosphere. Molecular Ecology, 31, 3934– 3950. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16549

All Publications

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