I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Environmental Plant Science (AEPS) at The Pennsylvania State University.  

As a Root-Rhizosphere Fellow associated with the Center for Root-Rhizosphere Biology, I am co-advised by Dr. Carolyn Lowry at the Weed Ecology Laboratory (Plant Science Dept, College of Agriculture) and Dr. Jesse Lasky in the Evolutionary Genetics, Phyisiology, and Ecology Laboratory (Biology Dept, College of Arts and Sciences).

My work explores roots and soil biogeochemistry in cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.), an invasive plant that is transforming ecosystem resource cycling in the Western US. Cheatgrass presence increases wildfire and aridification, so has deleterious effects on natural and managed systems alike. The feedback loop between cheatgrass and soil nitrogen availability is a driver of invasion, so identifying plant traits that facilitate this interaction is crucial to effective management. The rhizosphere ("root-associated") space is a promising interface to explore traits associated with adaptation and control of fundamental ecosystem dynamics.

Terrestrial plant growth and productivity is tightly linked to nitrogen availability, so many species have evolved interactions with soil microbes to enhance their access to his limited resource. These interactions are fundamental to plant functional capacity and overall ecosystem potential. 

While humans are highly attuned to aboveground expression of plant success, belowground interactions are inherently hidden. Yet, soil is where the majority of resources are acquired, and the site of direct interactions between the plant and the local community. Through chemosignaling at the root-rhizosphere interface, plants and microbes mutually influence each other in resource negotiations.

Invasive plants frequently are associated with an increase in nitrogen bioavailability, and with functional changes in the soil microbiome.  Thus, invasive plants are exceptional models to explore how mechanisms of plant-microbial signaling influence nitrogen cycling. Investigating the unique successes of these displaced plants serves as a catalog of mechanisms by which pioneer plants increase a critically limited nutrient. 

Insight into these mechanisms is important to restoration ecology and to maintaining agricultural yields even as abiotic stressors become more common due to climate change. Resource cycling constitutes the foundation of ecosystem dynamics, so elucidating how the plant community influences changes in the soil can give us the tools that we need to steward ecosystems towards a more resilient state.