Campus Address: N101-6 Dental Science Building (DSB)

Primary Department: Division of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, College of Dentistry

Interdisciplinary Department: Human Toxicology Program

Research Interests: My primary interests are relating human-associated microbial communities to maintaining health and initiating/sustaining disease, and the development and validation of improved visualization and analysis software necessary to further such analyses. I have significant experience studying microbial systems, Next Generation Sequencing technologies, phylogenetics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, and connecting such studies through multi-omics analysis techniques.

My current research focus is the study of the human oral microbiome and environmental influences such as electronic cigarette (vaping) use. In addition, I have particular experience studying the peri-implant microbiome, and was the first to establish definitively that the peri-implant microbiome is significantly different from the periodontal microbiome, even when examining directly adjacent teeth.

I am also the creator of the following open source software: PhyloToAST (Phylogenetic Tools for Analysis of Species-level Taxa), kraken-biom, PyMGRAST, FIND (Flow Investigation using N-Dimensions), and ProkaryMetrics. See my projects list for more information.