My work sits at the intersection of microbial physiology, cellular biology, and the development of new techniques for studying microbes in their native habitats. The driving question is how single-cell processes scale up to ecosystem-level function, and what that looks like in the microbes we haven’t yet learned to grow in the lab.
Current focus, Thiovulum
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Jean-Marie Volland in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Department at UC Santa Barbara. My research focuses on the sulfur-oxidizing bacterium Thiovulum, the fastest swimming bacterium known.
My work achieved the first cultivation of Thiovulum on defined media since the organism’s discovery over 240 years ago. The project combines genomics, expansion microscopy, and behavioral analysis to investigate how expanded intracytoplasmic respiratory membranes power ultrafast motility and emergent collective behavior at oxic-anoxic interfaces. This work was featured at the JGI New Lineages of Life Symposium (Nature Microbiology, 2026).
Previous work, multicellular magnetotactic bacteria
My PhD research with Dr. Roland Hatzenpichler at Montana State University focused on multicellular magnetotactic bacteria (MMB), the only currently known example of obligate multicellularity in bacteria. Because MMB have never been successfully cultivated, this work required developing and applying next-generation physiology techniques.
The resulting paper in PLOS Biology (2024) demonstrated that MMB are genetically heterogeneous consortia with metabolically differentiated cells, not clonal aggregates as previously assumed. The paper was selected as a PLOS Biology Editors Pick.
Themes and methods
The work clusters around a few recurring questions. How does subcellular organization enable environmental adaptation. What underlies rapid swimming and collective behavior in microbes like Thiovulum. How horizontal gene transfer and mobile elements shape microbial evolution. What role uncultured microbes play in ecosystems we still barely understand. The methods are correspondingly mixed, including confocal and stimulated Raman microspectroscopy, FISH variants (CARD, DOPE), substrate-analog probing, BONCAT, stable isotope probing, NanoSIMS, electron microscopy (SEM and TEM), and expansion microscopy, often combined as correlative workflows on a single sample. Analysis code is on GitHub when the work is published.