I am the leader of the Ocean Microbiology Group in the Climate Change Cluster (C3) at UTS.

The over-arching goal of my research is to understand how the seas smallest inhabitants ultimately control the ecology and biogeochemistry of the Ocean

My research interests incorporate aquatic microbial ecology and biological oceanography, and my research team tackles the important questions of who are the key microbial populations in different ocean ecosystems, and what they are doing? To answer these questions we examine the ecology of microbes across a range of marine environments (tropical coral reefs to Antarctica) and a continuum of spatiotemporal scales. At the ocean-basin scale we investigate how large-scale oceanographic processes (e.g. boundary currents and mesoscale eddies) influence microbial community dynamics and functionality. At the scale of individual drops of seawater, we consider the behaviours of individual microbes within a patchy chemical seascape. Finally, we are interested in the relationships (both positive and negative) between microorganisms and marine animals and plants.