Professional Certificate in Indigenous Research (2014 University of Melbourne) Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Research and Leadership (2013 University of Melbourne) Bachelor of Education (2006, Australian Catholic University) Diploma Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education (2003, Australian Catholic University)

My overall research interests focus on microbial phenotypic trait characterization. I have carried out extensive research on the ecology and physiology of two genera of marine cyanobacterium which form a major component of the marine food web: Prochlorococcus, the world’s most abundant photosynthetic microbe, and Synechococcus, which is more ubiquitous throughout different oceanic regimes. My primary research has focused on examining the physiological response to various ecologically significant environmental parameters, such as light, temperature and nutrients, which has been useful in helping understand spatial distributions of these marine cyanobacteria. I am also interested in the composition and distribution of natural populations of marine cyanobacteria communities as well as other members of the marine microbial web, such as photosynthetic picoeukaryotic phytoplankton and bacterioplankton, associated with marine cyanobactera. I have just been funded to expand my culture-based research to include growth optimization studies of marine microalgae that have potential in producing bioproducts. Additionally, I will be starting an examination of the phytoplankton and bacterioplankton communities associated with the Penobscot Estuary and Bay in mid-coast Maine. In addition to my work on phytoplankton ecology and physiology, I also am working on a project that will enable the collection of phenotypic information from published taxonomic literature in order to create large taxon-character matrices, which can then be used by scientists to help with analyzing, annotating and visualizing the Tree of Life. The matrices also can be combined with phylogenomic trees for conducting phylogenetic comparative analyses to test evolutionary hypotheses.