Kelli M
- Research Program Mentor
PhD at University of California San Diego (UCSD)
Expertise
Microbiology, Marine Biology, Bioinformatics, Science Communication
Bio
Hey! My name is Kelli and I recently completed my PhD at UC San Diego. While my degrees are on Environmental Science and Marine Biology - two things I’m very passionate about - I’m really a microbiologist and bioinformatician by training. During graduate school, I studied microorganisms (e.g., bacteria & archaea) that live in extreme environments within our oceans, including deep-sea trenches and hydrothermal vents. I also studied hydrocarbon degrading bacteria from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, and how deep-sea environmental conditions impact their ability to swim to and eat hydrocarbons. I have experience in both wet lab (experimental-based) and dry lab (computational/bioinformatics-based) microbiology, and love working with next-generation sequencing data to answer complex scientific questions. I have always had a passion for the ocean - exploring it, studying it, and especially protecting it! But as a kid, the idea of becoming a marine scientist seemed like a far-off dream or an unrealistic career. Now that I've made this dream come true for myself, I love mentoring young students and helping them figure out what their path may be within marine science. Outside of science, I love tending to my vegetable garden, crocheting, and taking my dogs to the beach!Project ideas
Deep Dive Into the Deep Sea
Humans have a profound impact on our environment, and this impact is felt even at the deepest parts within our oceans. To help communicate the impacts humans have on the deep-sea, and why we should care about these impacts, the student could use one or more media (e.g., podcast, video, infographic, etc.) to highlight the various ways in which humans impact the deep-sea, and what we can do to help!
Learning Through Scientific Literature
There is a plethora of scientific literature out there on every topic under the sun. Focusing on a topic of interest to you, learn to search for relevant literature, analyze papers to extract information from them, and organize references. Final project could include a review of the topic of interest, or communication of that topic through an infographic, podcast, etc.
The Power of Public Data
In the age of next-generation sequencing (NGS) there is more publicly available sequencing data than there are scientists to study it. I would love to help you identify an aspect of the broad field of microbiology that has yet to be investigated, develop an scientific question, and then leverage publicly available NGS data to try and answer it! For example - what is the global distribution of an ecologically important group of marine microbe? It doesn’t have to be marine related - let your imagination go wild! I can help you find the right data for your project, show you how to access it, and even teach you how to use bioinformatics to analyze it.
