David Molik

I’m interested in the factors that affect microbial communities’ diversity overtime. Which and how much of deterministic factors, like the environment that the microbes are occupying, and then more stochastic things, like selection and genetic drift affect the communities. I utilize Computational Genomics, and Computational Ecology to look at the dynamics of this relationship. This central Computational Eco-Evo theme of lends itself to other questions: What new computational tools need to exist in order to gain a deeper understanding of this dynamic? When exposed to an increasing deterministic factor, like salt concentration, how will microbial communities respond? How do microbial communities recover after stress? In order to answer these questions, I both write new software, generally in the vain of big data, as well as use experimental systems, specifically the tool-set that metabarcoding and whole genome sequencing can provide. This means that I implement new data-basing and alignment strategies in order to solve the questions that I am interested in.