principal investigator
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Alexander Chase, PhDDr. Chase received his BS at UC Los Angeles (UCLA) and his PhD at UC Irvine, studying the biogeographic patterns of microbes with Jennifer Martiny. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography with Paul Jensen, Dr. Chase became interested in the way microbes respond to their environment through the production of small molecule natural products. His research aims to bridge chemical and microbial ecology to uncover the mechanisms maintaining microbial diversity across environmental microbiomes. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Roy M. Huffington Dept. of Earth Sciences and an affiliate faculty of both the O'Donnell Data Science Institute and Center for Drug Discovery, Design, and Delivery at SMU.
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lab staff
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Bukola "Bukky" Ogungbe, Lab TechnicianBukky has a BS in Nuclear Medicine at University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas and a MS in Clinical Practice Management at Texas Tech University Health Science Center in Lubbock, Texas. She is currently working on her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Blue Marble University in Commonwealth of Dominica. Bukky also works with Prof. Neil Tabor and Dr. John Robbins in the Stable Isotope Lab in the Department of Earth Sciences at SMU.
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postdocs
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Ammara Khalid, PhDBefore joining the Chase Lab, Ammara completed a postdoc at Iowa State University in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. She earned her PhD in Biotechnology from RIKEN Japan in the Lab of Hiroyuki Osada where she focused on designing systematic approaches for discovering novel secondary metabolites and cellular regulation of secondary metabolite production in Streptomyces. Her research expertise includes metabolic engineering, CRISPR, synthetic biology tools development, GC/MS, HPLC, bioprocessing, and biosensor development.
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graduate students
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Motahare Haghighatjoo - PhD StudentMotahare completed her BS and MS degrees at Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran where she investigated the degradation of microplastics by environmental bacteria isolated from the Caspian Sea. She is interested in applying her background in spectroscopy and chromatography to answer questions related to chemical ecology and metabolite mediated interactions in environmental microbiomes.
Contact: LinkedIn | ResearchGate |
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Jamie Tijerina - PhD StudentJamie graduated from Drexel University with a BS in Biological Sciences and a Master of Business Administration. She spent the early part of her career in the flow cytometry core facilities at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and at Caltech, specializing in microbial and non-traditional cell sorting applications. She hopes to explore interactions between the environment and human activity, investigating them in the contexts of health outcomes and environmental economics, while also exploring the potential for downstream development of therapeutics.
Contact: LinkedIn | X | BlueSky | Personal Website |
undergraduate students
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Vigna LavuVigna is a Office of Engaged Learning Undergraduate Research Fellow interested in microbial ecology. She is a biology major and earth science minor working on the taxonomic diversity of cultured isolates collected from methane-impacted soils due to natural gas pipeline leaks.
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past members
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Millie MetchickMillie was an undergraduate who graduated in the Spring 2024 majoring in Earth Science. She is excited to apply her research skills to a future PhD program related to epidemiology and/or viral-mediated interactions. Currently she is a Clinical Research Coordinator at Columbia University Medical Center.
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Ruhani AhluwaliaRuhani was a Hamilton Undergraduate Research Scholar interested in how microbiomes respond to environmental perturbations. Ruhani will graduate with a physics major (minors in biology and chemistry), and is an excellent artist, hosting her own Art Exhibit "Inside Out and Outside In" at SMU Doolin Gallery.
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