Ph.D. Student, 2015-present
While mutualisms have historically been studied as pairwise species associations, organisms frequently interact with more than one mutualist across space and time, introducing the possibility of conflict among partners. The plant genus Turnera associates with a wide variety of mutualistic insects, including pollinators, defensive ants and wasps, and seed-dispersing ants. These disparate mutualisms can be in conflict with one another, and I am interested in understanding the role that these multiple mutualist effects have had on the evolution of Turnera. I am also interested in the invasion of complex mutualistic networks by exploitative third parties, and intend to investigate the potentially destabilizing role played by nectar-dwelling bacteria in Turnera. Furthermore, I will be investigating the mechanisms of resilience to invasion by “cheating” uncooperative symbionts in a legume-rhizobium symbiosis and developing the association between duckweeds and their assortment of bacterial partners as a study system to explore the evolution of mutualism.