I am interested in the broad question of why microbes live where they do. For any group of microbes, the more we explore, the more microbial diversity we discover, especially at the genetic level. But how does this genetic diversity impact microbial ecology? What evolutionary forces shaped (and still shape) these populations? Can we separate ecologically relevant variation from noise? To study these questions I use a variety of methods, principally bioinformatic but also experimental.
