I'm a microbiologist and entomologist currently pursuing a PhD in microbiology at Colorado State University under the advisorship of Dr. Jessica L. Metcalf and Dr. Brad Borlee. My work spans field studies of cadaveric decomposition and the computational side of multi-omics data analysis, mostly in R and Python, to understand the relationships between carrion, the insects it attracts, and the microbial communities they share. It's a system that bridges some of nature's most compelling biology, and one that's gone surprisingly understudied. Honestly, I just love basic science, and this niche gives me the chance to characterize aspects of the necrobiome that might otherwise never see study.
On this site you'll find my Blog, where I write up research progress, analyses, and the occasional update; my CV for the professional summary; a Gallery of my photography and macrophotography; and Tools, where I build small utilities for data analysis and convenience. You can also find me on GitHub.
Recent Posts
Why treating decomposition as a set of discrete stages loses critical information, creates artificial group boundaries, and misrepresents the biology — and what the field...
March 2026 in microbiome research: spatial transcriptomics goes microbial, gut-brain aging gets a mechanistic map, and food allergen severity turns out to be a microbiome...
Why 16S relative abundances behave differently from regular numbers, what breaks when you treat them like normal data, and which analytical tools are designed to...
What V3, V4, and V3-V4 actually mean, why the choice of variable region shapes what you see in your data, and how to pick the...
Comprehensive analysis of fungal communities across rabbit carcasses, gravesoil, and associated necrophagous insects reveals distinct mycobiome signatures and decomposition-stage dynamics.
Comparing paired-end versus forward-only ITS1 processing reveals substantial differences in read retention and ASV detection for fungal mycobiome analysis.