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Xin Sun

Principal Investigator

Xin (she/her) got her Ph.D. at Princeton University, where she fell in love with oceanography, especially the nitrogen cycle and marine microbes that drive it. Amazed by the critical roles of microbes in marine biogeochemistry, she explored the rules behind microbial assembly as a Hutchinson Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. As a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Science, she developed new theoretical frameworks to bring microbes into the heart of ecosystem models. Now at the University of Pennsylvania, her group blends biogeochemical field studies, metagenomics, microbial ecology experiments, modeling, and theory to uncover the rules governing microbial community assembly and to predict the dynamics of nitrogen and carbon cycling in a rapidly changing ocean.

Email: sun12@sas.upenn.edu

Elizabeth Wallace

Research Specialist

Elizabeth (she/her) has studied marine microbes and biogeochemical cycles (Ward Lab, Princeton University), diets and habitats of Megalodon sharks (O'Dea Lab, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), and jellyfish food webs (Sutherland Lab, University of Oregon). She is currently interested in the ways that marine organisms interact with each other and their environments across varied spatial and temporal scales, as well as marine science methods development and education.

Email: ewallac@sas.upenn.edu

Jazmine Rud

Ph.D. student

Jazmine (she/her) is interested in the impacts of changing environments on microbial communities, as well as their downstream effects. She hopes to investigate these effects at multiple biological scales by integrating ecological, evolutionary, and molecular approaches into her research. During her undergrad at Penn, she worked in a soil biogeochemistry lab studying carbon storage in Dark Earths. She also investigated the interactions between mutualistic and parasitic microorganisms in a root microbiome lab at Penn.

Email: rud@sas.upenn.edu

Navadeep Budda

High School Intern

Navadeep (he/him) is a senior at Lambert High School in Suwanee, Georgia. His interests revolve around ecological dynamics in low-oxygen ocean zones (OMZs), especially how modular denitrification, which is how different microbes perform different steps, control bioavailable nitrogen and the production of nitrous oxide. He’s excited to create and use theoretical models that connect resource tradeoffs, like organic matter vs. nitrate, to which microbial modules win where, and he’s passionate in making these ideas accessible to younger, non-specialist audiences.

Lily Weaver

Undergraduate Intern

Lily Weaver is an undergraduate at Princeton University studying Computer Science. She’s interested in applying machine learning and mathematical modeling to a range of problems across disciplines, including microbial community dynamics, epidemic modeling, and financial forecasting. Her past work includes projects on contrastive learning for microbiome-immune prediction and mean field modeling of epidemic mitigation policies.

Mingming Chen

Postdoc Scholar

Mingming is interested inexploring marine nitrogen cycles, particularly denitrification, nitrification, and nitrogen fixation, by integrating omics datasets, in-situ rate measurements, and ecological modeling. He earned his Ph.D. from Xiamen University, where his research provided in-depth insights into the taxonomic and metabolic diversity of N2-fixers and nitrifiers, the spatial distribution and environmental controls of nitrogen fixation and nitrification rates, and the coupling among different nitrogen cycle processes in the South China Sea and the Western Pacific. At Penn, he aims to further explore the microbial mechanisms underlying the marine nitrogen cycle across broader regions—such as oxygen minimum zones and even global oceans—by incorporating ecological modeling at larger spatial scales.