Rebecca T. Batstone, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institute for Genomic Biology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Institute for Genomic Biology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Photo credit: Katrina Kaur
I am an integrative evolutionary biologist who uses mutualism theory, large-scale manipulative experiments, experimental evolution, quantitative genetics, and bioinformatics to better understand evolution in a symbiotic world.
An updated copy of my CV can be found here, and Google Scholar page here.
News/updates:
An updated copy of my CV can be found here, and Google Scholar page here.
News/updates:
- Dec 2020: I was featured in the Microbial Systems Initiative's "Researcher Spotlight", where I discuss my research journey, how being an IGB Fellow has impacted my research, and the importance of scientific outreach.
- Our paper in Science was just published, so excited to see this work out! If you want to know more about how microbes adapt to their hosts, you can listen to this interview, read this excellent blog post and news article, or just email me to get a copy of the actual article!
We are all just islands in a microbial sea.
The recent rise in microbiome research has shown that symbiotic microbes are ubiquitous and play vital functions that impact host fitness; yet we lack a general understanding of how microbes evolve. I combine experimental evolution with various genomic techniques to study how mutualistic microbes adapt to hosts, to understand how changing abiotic conditions modulate such adaptation, and to identify the genomic mechanisms underlying symbiosis evolution. For more about my research, click the "Research" button below. I am also committed to teaching, mentorship, and science communication. You can read more about this by clicking the "Teaching/Outreach" button, and you can watch a few of my talks by clicking the "Talks" button.
