Past and Present Visiting Scholars
Dominik Lücking, Visiting Master’s Student Fall 2018
Dominik is a master’s student at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, where he is working on the detection of unknown ssDNA prophages in genomes of marine bacteria.
During his visit, he was working on phage-prediction within metagenomic datasets and the creation of a searchable Hidden-Markov-Model database and learning about various bioinformatic tools, from clustering algorithms to the newest phage-predictors.
Shijie Bai, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar Fall 2017
Dr. Bai is a visiting scholar as of December 2017, from the Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the Sullivan lab, his project is focused on the ecogenomics and potential biogeochemical impacts of deep sea viruses from the Hadal trench.
Alaina Weinheimer, Visiting Master’s Student Fall 2017
Alaina Weinheimer is a master student at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany. She is interested in the role of viruses in symbiotic relationships. Her master’s project explores the viruses associated with the symbioses between deep sea vent mussels and their chemosynthetic microbial partners. While at the Sullivan Lab, she will be learning how to isolate viruses from the symbiotic partners and how to use bioinformatic tools to describe these viruses.
Paul Hyman, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar Fall 2017
Dr. Hyman is an Associate Professor in the Biology and Toxicology department of Ashland University in Ohio. He is interested in the evolution of bacteriophage host range and how this influences the ecology of bacteriophages. Recently, he has begun examining how altered isolation protocols can influence the types of phages obtained from environmental samples. He came to the Sullivan lab for his sabbatical to learn techniques for working with soil viruses and for metagenomic analysis of soil viromes.
Nádia Neto, Visiting PhD Student, Spring 2017
Nádia is a PhD student at the Rega Institute for Medical Research at the KU Leuven, Belgium. She is interested in gut viruses and their role in health and disease. Her PhD project focuses on studying gut viruses in ulcerative colitis. While visiting the Sullivan Lab during Spring 2017, she worked on the TARA Oceans project and learned tools for phage-host predictions and protein clustering.
Anyun Zhang, PhD, Visiting Scholar, Fall 2016
Dr. Zhang is an Associate Professor in the College of Life Sciences at Sichuan University, China. He joined the Sullivan Lab in Autumn 2016 as a visiting scholar. Dr. Zhang’s research focuses is on the mechanism of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) between multi-drug resistant bacteria and the environment that is impacted by antibiotics. Phages might play an important role in regional resistance gene transmission. He is currently working on the phage metagenomic project and trying to find the abundance and diversity of ARGs in the phage metagenomes of the antibiotic polluted environments.
Elena Lara, PhD, Visiting Scholar, Summer 2016
Dr. Lara is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Marine Science (ISMAR) in Venice, Italy. She is interested in the ecological role of viruses in the deep sea. During her postdoc she studied viral diversity and phage-host interactions in the deep Mediterranean Sea. While visiting Sullivan Lab, Summer 2016, she learned the tools to analyze viral genomes, comparative genomics and metagenomics.
Matthew Kane, PhD, Visiting Scholar
Dr. Kane is a Program Director in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation, where he has been since 1999. While on sabbatical, he visited with Tuscon Marine Phage Lab (TMPL) and learned the tools of comparative genomics and metagenomics, and studied the evolution and ecology of the reductive acetyl-CoA pathway in bacteria and archaea. Dr. Kane’s NSF Profile
Joshua Weitz, PhD, Visiting Scholar, Fall 2013 & Spring 2014
Dr. Weitz a visiting professor from Georgia Tech was on sabbatical from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Fall 2013 and Spring 2014. While visiting, Dr. Weitz collaborated with the TMPL group to develop theoretical and computational models that enable discoveries into the ecology and evolution of virus-microbe interactions.
Weitz Group @ Georgia Tech
Hugo Doré, PhD, Visiting Master’s Student
Hugo was in the second year of his Master’s Degree at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (Lyon, France) when he visited TMPL for a four-month internship. He is interested in microbial ecology in general, with a particular interest for interactions between microbes. The first internship of his master’s degree focused on the interaction between plant root and a plant growth promoting bacterium, Azospirillum. He then directed his interest toward marine environments, studying chromatic acclimation in the marine cyanobacterium Synechococcus at the Roscoff Biological Station in France. At TMPL, he worked with Cristina Howard and Simon Roux on the specificity of phage-host interactions.
Guilhem Doulcier, Visiting Master’s Student
Guilhem was a biology Master’s student an the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France at the time of his visit to TMPL. He is passionate about the interactions between computational, mathematical and biological sciences, more precisely in the field of ecology and evolution. He was visiting TMPL for about four months in order to work on the processing of viral metagenomic data and its applications in the study of patterns of viral diversity.
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