Breakfast

Introduction & Welcome

Dr. Heidi Aronson

Lithosyntrophic Phosphite Oxidation: From Early Earth to Modern Environments

Dr. Heidi Aronson is a postdoc in the Energy & Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley. She earned her undergraduate degree in Biology from Occidental College in 2016, where she studied the microbiome of a deep-sea bone-eating snail. She then worked as a Planetary Protection Engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory before completing her PhD in Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography at the University of Southern California in 2023. Her current research focuses on syntrophic microbial interactions powered by inorganic electron donors. During her PhD, she applied thermodynamic and cultivation-based approaches to investigate microbial sulfur cycling in the sulfidic karst at Frasassi, Italy.

Dr. Emily Davenport

What shapes and shatters host-microbiome phylosymbiosis

Emily R. Davenport is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Penn State University who is interested in understanding the relationship between humans and our microbiomes. Having long been interested in microbes, Dr. Davenport earned a Bachelor of Science degree with comprehensive honors in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. She became familiar with genomic techniques while working at the microarray company Roche NimbleGen between 2007 and 2009. She merged her interests in bacterial and eukaryotic genomics during her PhD in Human Genetics, which she earned from the University of Chicago in 2014. She continued to explore the role between host genetics, the microbiome, and phenotype during a postdoc at Cornell University between 2014 and 2019, which included a year as a visiting postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology between 2018 - 2019. Since fall 2019, she has lead a lab at Penn State interested in understanding how human gut microbiomes are determined and what role they have on human health and evolution.

Break

Dr. James Lendemer

Lichen Reconceptualized: New Perspectives on an Enduring Biological Paradox

Dr. James Lendemer is the Curator of Botany at the New York State Museum where he studies the dynamic microcosms that are lichen symbioses and oversees one of the oldest botanical natural history collections in the United States. He is the botanist for the New York State Science Service and Biological Survey and adjunct faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, and his Ph.D. In Plant Sciences from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2012. He pursued postdoctoral research at the New York Botanical Garden studying lichen biodiversity in the threated swamps of the Mid-Atlantic Coast. This work led to a career of assembling large-scale biodiversity datasets to address fundamental questions at intersection of biotic interactions, microbial symbioses, and ecosystem health. On any given day he could be found in an Adirondack bog collecting ecological data, sampling lichens in Lower Manhattan for population genetic studies or driving a truck on the New York Thruway to rescue an orphaned natural history collection. 

Catered Lunch

Dr. Gregory Bonito

Fungal symbiosis with bacteria, algae and plants

Gregory Bonito is an associate professor at Michigan State University who researched mycorrhizal fungal ecology and phylogenetics during his PhD at Duke. Dr. Bonito's research program at MSU encompasses fungal biodiversity, ecology and evolution, with a focus on microbiome sciences and fungal symbioses – specifically fungal symbiosis with bacteria and photobionts (e.g. plants, algae). Significant research accomplishments include the discovery and description of new fungal genera and species, as well as multi-omic characterizations of novel fungal-bacterial and fungal-algal symbioses. Dr. Bonito is active in the international mycological community and with international collaborations on fungal biodiversity, function, and bioengineering. Dr. Bonito is faculty advisor of the MSU Mycology Society and Vice President of the Mycological Society of America. Over the past 10 years he has published 155 papers, 5 book chapters, and has mentored 9 postdocs, 9 PhD students, 5 MS students, 40 undergraduate students and 12 international research scholars. 

Break

Dr. Dakota "Cody" McCoy

Solar-powered animals, climate change, and coral reefs

Dakota “Cody” McCoy unites biology, physics, and game theory to explore intimate symbioses in nature. Cody is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Ecology and Evolution at UChicago and the Marine Biological Lab. She completed her PhD in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, where her advisor David Haig taught her about the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things, then she was a postdoc at Stanford. She investigates why climate change devastates some coral reefs but spares others—and why human pregnancy, another intimate biological symbiosis, is surprisingly risky. In both cases, McCoy tests how subtle conflicts of interest (host-symbiont, maternal-fetal) drive instability.

Dr. Andrew Roger

The Two-Billion-Year Legacy of the Mitochondrial Symbiosis: From Eukaryogenesis to Anaerobic Protist–Prokaryote Partnerships

Andrew J. Roger is currently a Distinguished Research Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Over two and a half decades, Andrew and his collaborators have employed comparative genomic, phylogenetic, cell-biological, and computational modelling approaches to clarify how eukaryotic cells and their symbiont-derived organelles originated and diversified over the past approximately two billion years. His research has advanced understanding of the deepest relationships in the eukaryotic tree of life, the origins of eukaryotes and their mitochondria, and the repeated adaptation of diverse protistan lineages to low-oxygen environments. A major theme of his recent work is the evolution of anaerobic protist–bacterial symbioses that shape eukaryotic cell biology and metabolic evolution (see https://rogerlab.github.io/).

Career Panel