Britt Koskella
(Co-Director)
Britt is an Associate Professor in Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores the importance of the bacteria and viruses making up the microbiome in shaping plant health, ecology, and evolution. She received her BA from the University of Virginia in 2001 and her PhD from Indiana University in 2008, and subsequently held postdoctoral and independent research fellowships in both the US (funded by the NSF) and UK (funded by NERC) at Oxford University and the University of Exeter. Her work is focused on understanding how bacteriophage viruses shape bacterial evolution, microbiome diversity, and ultimately the health of host organisms. Her group combines laboratory experimental evolution with studies of natural diversity to determine when and how phages impact microbial diversity, focusing primarily on the plant phyllosphere (above ground). More recently she has been exploring both how and why the microbiome associated with plants shapes pathogen establishment and disease progression, and has demonstrated that plant microbiomes can be selected upon to be better adapted to their hosts.
Personal page: https://ib.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/koskellab
Jonelle Basso
(Co-Director)
Jonelle is a Research Scientist in the plant-microbe interactions group at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is a microbial ecologist with research currently focused on plant-microbe interactions. Her work explores the interactions of viruses with plant microbiomes in the rhizosphere (the microenvironment at the interface of roots and soil). She received her B.Sc. from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica and M.Sc. from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. She obtained a PhD in microbiology from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and subsequently held a postdoctoral research position at the JGI. Her group leverages a coupled computational and experimental framework where they employ various omics technologies, strain engineering, microscopy and experimental characterization methods to learn more about the molecular underpinnings of tripartite plant-bacterial-phage interactions occurring at the rhizosphere.
Personal page: https://biosciences.lbl.gov/profiles/jonelle-tamara-basso/
Eoin Brodie
(Co-Director)
Eoin obtained his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Microbiology from University College Dublin in Ireland and joined Berkeley Lab following postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He is currently the Deputy Director of the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the feedbacks between microorganisms and their natural environments, with a primary focus on soil and subsurface systems. His group develops experimental and computational approaches to determine how microorganisms influence soil health and biogeochemical processes, and how trait information derived from genomes can be used to predict microbiome function from micrometer to watershed scales.
Personal page: https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/eoin-brodie/
Asa Conover
(Graduate Coordinator)
Asa is a PhD student in Integrative Biology and Berkeley Fellow studying plant-associated bacterial and fungal communities. He is a microbial ecologist with a broad love of natural history. He has worked with a variety of organisms, including cyanobacteria, corals, frogs, and lizards. His current focus is on the use of the insectivorous California pitcher plant (Darlingtonia californica) as an ideal system to explore the assembly and function of microbiomes.