by Helen Hill for CBIOMES
A warm welcome to Olivia Ahern who recently joined MBL-CBIOMES to work with Joe Vallino.
Olivia Ahern is a microbial ecologist interested in organism interactions and how they impact biogeochemical cycling, adaptation, and evolution.
As a postdoctoral scholar in Joe Vallino’s group at MBL Ahern is working on marine connectivity in the food web and investigating trophic cascades using stable isotope probing, genomics, and ecosystem modeling.
Ahern holds a PhD from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography in Biological Oceanography where her PhD advisor was Tatiana Rynearson. During her PhD, Ahern studied interactions between diatoms and bacteria using molecular techniques (i.e. metabarcoding, metagenomics, and genotyping) to look at host genetics and the microbiome in both field-based and laboratory experiments.
Story image: In her spare time Ahern enjoys cooking, photography, and going on hikes with her husband and their dog Loafer.
Links
Recent Publication
O.M. Ahern, K.A. Whittaker, T.C. Williams, D.E. Hunt, T.A. Rynearson (2021), Host genotype structures the microbiome of a globally dispersed marine phytoplankton, PNAS, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2105207118