Career:

  • 2017-Present: PhD student in Bioengineering, UC Berkeley, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
  • 2012-2016: BS in Bioengineering, Rice University

Research interests:

I’m interested in combining microbial evolution experiments and evolutionary theory to help understand how nature has generated and maintained the vast biological diversity we see around us. This includes asking questions such as, when is ecological diversification favored to occur? How do (co)evolutionary forces shape microbial communities? How do epistasis and ecology combine to influence fitness landscapes?

Selected publications:

Ascensao JA, Datta P, Hancioglu B, Sontag E, Gennaro ML, Igoshin OA. Non-monotonic Response to Monotonic Stimulus: Regulation of Glyoxylate Shunt Gene-Expression Dynamics in M. tuberculosisPLOS Computational Biology. 2016 Feb 22;12(2):e1004741. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004741.