Staff

Ben Bolduc, PhD, Computational Scientist  bolduc.10@osu.edu
Ben joined the Sullivan lab in 2015 from Montana State University, where his biochemistry PhD focused on bioinformatic and wet lab approaches to study RNA viruses in Yellowstone National Park. In the Sullivan Lab, he has continued his bioinformatic training by assisting in the development of iVirus, a project to make commonly used viral metagenomic informatics tools available to the community. He also works on creating tools specifically for analyzing viral metagenomic datasets in terms of taxonomic and functional annotations where no references exist, as well as aiding in the study of novel viruses out of permafrost in Abisko, Sweden. Finally, his work extends to development of large-scale, collaborative databases to serve as a data repository and analysis tool for a wide array of complex datasets. Together, these projects seek to uncover the nature of viruses in natural ecosystems and ultimately their intimate relation with their hosts.

Marie Burris, Research Technician burris.183@osu.edu
Marie joined the Sullivan lab in September 2018. She graduated from Ohio State University with a BS in Microbiology. She worked in the Wilkins lab prior to her graduation primarily on the anaerobic isolation and culturing of bacterial species from hydraulic fracturing wells.

Ami Fonfana, Research Assistant fofana.5@osu.edu
Ami joined the Sullivan lab in March 2022. She obtained her master’s degree in environmental science from Ohio State University. Her MS work in Dr. Virginia Rich’s lab focused on microbial substrate utilization in peatlands of Northern Sweden. Ami has now redirected her focus from microbes in soils to microbes in oceans. Her current work entails Synechococcus culturing, flow cytometry and viral tagging of marine cyanophages.

Cristina Howard-Varona, PhD, Research Scientist howard-varona.2@osu.edu
Cristina obtained her MSc in Biotechnology from the Polytechnique University of Valencia (Spain) and her PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Arizona (USA). She joined the lab at OSU as a postdoc in 2015 and is currently a research scientist interested in virocell ecology and metabolism in diverse organisms including Cellulophaga baltica, Pseudoalteromonas, Cyanobacteria, and others.

Olivier Zablocki, PhD, Grants & Research Portfolio Manager olivier.zablo@gmail.com

Ahmed Zayed, PhD, Research Scientist  zayed.10@osu.edu
Ahmed Zayed joined the Sullivan Lab in Spring 2017 as a PhD student. Before coming to the lab, he finished his master’s degree in Microbiology and Immunology and his undergraduate degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences, both from Cairo University, Egypt. Co-advised by Dr. Virginia Rich at OSU, he completed his PhD in 2019 where he studied microbe-environment interactions in the arctic and sub-arctic terrestrial and aquatic systems. Ahmed is interested in studying complex microbial and viral communities as well as their complex interactions across diverse ecosystems, including the global ocean, soils, and animal-associated ecosystems. By understanding the global and local determinants of community structure and function, he aims at finding solutions to global environmental and health problems. He is currently a Research Scientist in the Sullivan Lab, where he focuses on RNA virus ecology and evolution in the oceans.