Postdoctoral Researchers

Jiarong Guo, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate guo.1773@osu.edu
Jiarong is interested in microbial ecology and bioinformatics, using meta-omics to understand the unknown majority of microbes and viruses and their functions. For his PhD and first post-doctoral position at Michigan State, he mainly studied the microbiome around biofuel crop roots (rhizosphere) to identify bacterial species and functions enriched around the rhizosphere for potential engineering of a beneficial microbiome. Jiarong also learned to program and develop bioinformatics pipelines that enable efficient and scalable metagenomic analyses with large shotgun sequencing dataset. In the Sullivan Lab he works with the iVirus team to help develop the next generation of tools for viral ecology, including viral sequence identification and classification.

Marion Urvoy, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Marion joined the Sullivan lab in September 2022 after obtaining her Ph.D. in marine biology from the University of Western Brittany (France). Her thesis investigated the processes structuring the composition and function of marine and estuarine bacterial communities and their impact on global marine biogeochemical cycles. In particular, she focused on quorum sensing, a communication mechanism used by bacteria. In the Sullivan lab, she currently studies virocell metabolism and its impact on the extracellular environment.

Akbar Adjie Pratama, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate pratama.3@osu.edu Adjie’s website | Adjie on Twitter
Adjie obtained his Ph.D. in November 2018 from Department of Microbial Ecology, Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His Ph.D. research focused on the role of bacteriophage in the ecology and evolution of fungal-interactive (soil) bacteria, Paraburkholderia species. In September 2019, he joined the Sullivan lab, where the main goal is to unveil the diversity and the ecological significance, e.g. in nutrient cycling and alter soil microbiome communities, of soil viral populations from IsoGenie’s near-decade sampling along a permafrost thaw gradient.

James Wainaina, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate wainaina.4@osu.edu
James obtained his PhD in Biochemistry specialization genomics and computational biology in 2019 from the University of Western Australia (Perth, Australia). His research focus was on phylogenomics and evolution of viruses and insect vectors within smallholder agro-ecosystems in the western highlands of Kenya. His primary interests are in understanding the evolution of viruses and the potential drivers of this evolution, using Bayesian phylogenetic methods and next-generation sequencing. He joined the Sullivan lab in June 2019, to investigate global AMGs and RNA viruses as part of the Tara Oceans research project.