Hi I'm ant. I study the microbiota of dead bodies and the insects that colonize them.
To tease apart the broader ecology of cadaveric decomposition, I leverage modern sequencing technologies and bioinformatics to characterize ephemeral relationships spanning multiple trophic levels and temporalities.
I could argue that there's a lot of merit to characterizing something that has gone woefully understudied for this long but honestly, I just love basic science. This area of study represents a niche that bridges two of nature's most compelling actors—insects and carrion—and gives me the opportunity to characterize aspects of the collective necrobiome they underpin that might otherwise never see study.
Microbiome research offers us a promising way to investigate the microbial ecology of ephemeral ecosystems like this in a way that was previously impossible; and with this luxury, I want to contribute to the field by further strengthening carrion and necrophagous invertebrates as model research systems.
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