Profile
Jessica is a doctoral candidate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Her work investigates the diverse microbial communities (microbiomes) that live within a number of marine organisms including bony fishes, elasmobranchs, lancelets and sponges. Her primary methodology involves bioinformatic analysis of DNA sequences to tease apart the form and function of microbial genomes in these host-associated marine microbiomes. Her work has been highly interdisciplinary and collaborative, with her most recent publication bridging the fields of microbiology, bioinformatics, and natural product chemistry to uncover a microbial source of potentially toxic compounds in the environment. In addition to peer-reviewed publications, Jessica’s passion for microbiology has been recognized with awards from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Claude E. ZoBell Fellowship for Microbiology. She hopes to bring that passion to a career focused on non-model organisms, a focus which will expand our understanding of the vastly different ways by which animals and the microbial world interact.
