Research updates, data snapshots, and analysis summaries from my PhD work.

Decomposition Stage Is a Continuous Variable

Why treating decomposition as a set of discrete stages loses critical information, creates artificial group boundaries, and misrepresents the biology — and what the field has tried to do about...

Microbiome Monthly: March 2026

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 problem.

Compositionality in 16S Data Explained

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 handle the constraint.

16S Variable Regions Explained

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 right one.

FOCO Summer Fly Survey

A preliminary survey of forensically relevant Diptera near CSU Fort Collins campus using commercial bait traps during summer 2025.