People

I grew up near the Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario in upstate New York. I didn't know any scientists growing up, but I fell in love with ecology, evolution, and microbiology as an undergrad. I did my Ph.D. at MIT studying genome evolution in Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth. I then did a postdoc at Caltech where I learned a lot about microbiology and genetics. My current research interests include microbial adaptation to climate change and virus-host coevolution.

My research focuses on determining how resource competition, viral pressures, and microbial interactions influence the ecology of aquatic ecosystems. Through these lenses I explore the factors controlling the population dynamics of marine picocyanobacteria, Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus.

My undergrad major was Geo-Biology and since then I have been curious about the interaction between biology and its surroundings. More precisely I want to conduct research that brings us closer to understanding how microbes shape and are shaped by their environment. This had led me to conducting research on the Great Lakes microbial community and its potential response to climate change. 

I am happy to answer questions about STEM or to talk about my experience as a first generation and woman in STEM. 

I like organizing outreach events for younger students and participating in student organizations. I also spend time playing games like Among Us and Wordle!  

Jessi is interested in how environmental context shapes microbial genomes and the ways in which molecular processes scale to influence ecosystem function. Her current work explores patterns of microdiversity in deepwater-adapted Chloroflexi in the Laurentian Great Lakes. Previously, she studied environmental science as an undergraduate at Temple University and worked as a lab technician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia/UPenn where she studied gut-microbial interactions in the context of C. difficile infection.

I am a PhD student in the Committee on Microbiology originally from upstate New York. I originally became interested in environmental microbiology studying cool systems like the Hudson River Estuary, meromictic Green Lake, and now the Laurentian Great Lakes! In the lab, I am interested in studying the genetics of microbes with unique metabolic traits such as aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria (AAPs), as well as nitrifiers, in order to learn more about their ecological roles in aquatic environments.

I graduated from Johns Hopkins university with a BSc in Molecular and Cellular Biology where I studied how the metabolism of microbes are influenced by artificial aeration systems. I'm interested in combining computational and experimental techniques to study aquatic microbial communities, including the viruses of the Great Lakes!

Sara earned her Ph.D. in aquatic microbial ecology at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. She joined the Coleman lab as a postdoc and played a critical role in building our Great Lakes time series. Sara's current work focuses on the ecological genomics of picocyanobacteria in the Great Lakes.

I am a fourth-year environmental science & biology major at UChicago. For my senior honors thesis, I developed a microbial timeseries collected at Promontory Point, Lake Michigan. In the lab, I have also worked on Synechococcus physiology.

I’m an undergraduate majoring in Environmental Science! I fell in love with microbes after taking Global Biogeochemical Cycles and Environmental Microbiology. I am continuing weekly collections for a full year time series analysis of the microbial communities in Lake Michigan.

Emma is a third-year undergraduate majoring in chemistry and environmental science. She is passionate about environmental issues and biogeochemistry! She is fascinated by microbial metabolic diversity and hopes to gain a deeper understanding of their wonders. Outside of the lab, she plays flute and bakes bread.