Background
I am an evolutionary biologist and a community ecologist with a focus on drivers of community assemblies across the tree of life to understand the mechanisms underlying biodiversity build up in ecosystems. Most of my previous research concentrates on understanding drivers of assemblies and functions of complex microbial communities (both host-associated and environmental) and investigating drivers of avian-malaria host-parasite associations. So far, birds have been the focal group of host organisms in my research, along with environmental bacterial communities in under-explored cave ecosystems.
Current and future work
In my current postdoctoral position, at Dr. Kristine Bohmann group (Environmental DNA group, Section for Molecular Ecology and Evolution) at the GLOBE institute at the University of Copenhagen, I am focusing on utilisation of air eDNA to characterise vertebrate communities and develop air sampling as a tool for biodiversity monitoring. In addition to this, I have also received a VILLUM experimental grant to investigate the possibility of using moss as natural traps of eDNA. I intend to work towards further developing and validating these method, which will provide a cost-effective and efficient tool for terrestrial biodiversity monitoring.
Education
I received my B. A. in Biology from Earlham college (2015) in Richmond, IN, USA, Masters in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (2018) and PhD in host-microbe interactions from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen (2021: Supervisor Dr. Knud A. Jønsson).