Dr. Damian Hernandez | Former Postdoctoral Fellow, PhD Student, USDA NIFA Graduate Fellow | NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology at University of Toronto and Amsterdam
Damian (he/him/his) is a former postdoctoral researcher and former PhD student in the Afkhami lab. He is interested in understanding the crosstalk between plants and their microbiome at a molecular/systems level. He became interested in molecular plant biology while completing his Master’s thesis on transcriptional complexes in hormone-mediated immune responses. He has continued researching molecular plant biology, but with a focus on plant-microbe interactions response to environmental stress, particularly the regulation of their underlying molecular networks. Damian agreed to stay on for a short-term postdoc working on single-cell sequencing of microbiomes before starting an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship abroad in late Spring 2024. Learn more about Damian at his website.
Dr. Allie Igwe | Former NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology & USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow | Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech University
In summer of 2020, Allie (she/her/hers) completed her PhD in the Vannette lab at University of California Davis where she conducted research on plant growth promoting bacteria in serpentine and nonserpentine soils. She joined the Afkhami lab as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Fall of 2020 to work on local adaptation, genomics, and plant growth promotion of N-fixing bacteria in different edaphic conditions. She then earned a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow to research how to engineer microbiomes for crop improvement in sweet potato in my lab and in collaboration with researchers at Rice University. She has now taken a tenure-track faculty job at Virginia Tech University. To read more about Allie check out her website.
Dr. Joshua Fowler | Former Postdoctoral Fellow | NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology at the University of Colorado and University of Wisconsin Madison
Josh (he/him/his) joined the lab in May 2023. He completed a dissertation on how fungal endophytes influence plant population demography and species’ range limits in Tom Miller’s lab at Rice University. Josh then investigated how soil microbial effects scale up to impact plant population and metapopulation dynamics in the Florida Scrub ecosystem at Archbold Biological Station as part of my and Chris Searcy’s NSF microbial landscapes grant. Now Josh has moved on to a new postdoc position with an NSF fellowship. Learn more about Josh here.
Amanda Rawstern |Former PhD Student & USDA NIFA Graduate Fellow | Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Pittsburgh
Amanda (she/her/hers) joined the lab in August 2020 and completed her PhD in early fall 2025. Her research interests include plant-microbiome interactions response to biotic stressors such as plant pathogens and investigating microbial applications in agriculture and habitat conservation. Her dissertation demonstrated how microbiome networks can be used to identify keystone taxa, how multiple mutualistic interactions modulate plant transcriptomic responses to pathogens, and how domestication shapes microbiome stability and functional capacity in citrus and their wild relatives. To learn more check out her website.
Dr. Brianna Almeida | Former PhD Student & NSF Graduate Fellow | Tri-Institutional Molecular Mycology Fellow at NCSU
Brianna (she/her/hers) joined the lab in August 2017. She is fascinated by the mechanism that shape different levels of biodiversity. This stems from her previous work in a seed bank germination study from different possible restoration areas in the Dinner Island Ranch wildlife management area. For her PhD, Brianna worked on plant-microbial interactions on the Everglades tree islands, investigating how microbiomes can be used in real-world restoration and how these communities respond to management. She then studied the morning glories of the Pine Rockland to understand microbiome diversity leads to non-additive effects on productivity. She is now has a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at through the Tri-Institutional Molecular Mycology and Pathogenesis Training Program which is a joint program between Duke, UNC, and NCSU in the research triangle. Check out her website.
Dr. Kasey Kiesewetter | Former PhD Student & NSF Graduate Fellow | Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Waikato in New Zealand
Kasey (she/her/hers) is a former Afkhami lab PhD student who is broadly interested in understanding the effects of the global change on communities. She became interested in community ecology during her undergraduate study where she wrote her honors thesis on phenological mismatch in ant mediated seed dispersal. During her PhD, she continued researching community interactions but focused on how plant-microbe interactions influence communities and their effects for conservation and restoration. In particular, Kasey investigated the impact of habitat fragmentation on microbial communities and their interactions with plants and herbivores in the imperiled Pine Rocklands of Southern Florida (2% remaining of habitat). She is now having a great time doing research on land use effects on microbiomes in New Zealand as a postdoctoral researcher. To learn more about Kasey and her research, check out her website.
Dr. Dan Revillini | Former Postdoc | Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow
Dan was an Afkhami lab postdoc who is now headed to Spain as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow! Dan is broadly interested in cooperation, mutualisms, ecology, and evolution. Within these themes, he is more narrowly interested in plant-fungal-bacterial ecology in soils, including their interactions and responses to environmental change. His Ph.D. research addressed the impact of shifting grassland diversity and resource availability on soil bacterial and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal community composition and functionality. As a co-advised postdoc with Michelle Afkhami and Chris Searcy, Dan has been characterizing the soil microbial communities of the Florida scrub habitat, specifically at Archbold Biological Station. Several of his projects used a historical range of fire frequencies and manipulative prescribed burns to determine microbial compositional and functional responses to fire, targeting carbon cycling gene expression patterns, and then measured subsequent microbial effects on endemic plant fitness (New Phytologist 2022). Another looked at allelopathic effects on soil microbiomes and plant-microbial interactions across the plant community, and a final project profiled microbial communities across the gap-landscape of Archbold’s scrub habitat to ultimately identify the role of microbes in shaping landscape-scale plant distributions using modeling methods. Check out more about Dan on his website!
Dr. Aaron David | Former Postdoc | Director of the Plant Lab, Archbold Biological Station
Aaron was an Afkhami lab postdoc and is now the Director of Plant Lab at Archbold Biological Station. He is interested in how plant-microbe interactions influence plant conservation and restoration. Specifically, his work considered how plant-soil feedbacks affected the demography of endangered plants. He conducted research at Archbold Biological Station, which boasts populations of listed plant species endemic to Florida, detailed demographic data on these species, and a 5x5m abiotic grid dataset. Aaron was coadvised by Chris Searcy. Aaron left the lab to work at the USDA from 2018-2021. He is now the Director of the Plant lab at Archbold Biological Station. To learn more about Aaron’s interests and experiences please see his group’s website.
Dr. Suresh Subedi | Former Postdoc | Assistant Professor at Arkansas Tech University
Suresh was an Afkhami lab postdoc and is now Assistant Professor at Arkansas Tech University. Suresh was interested in answering broader ecological questions on how plants respond to environmental change. His research approach combined modeling, field and control experiment. Suresh led a collaborative project in the Everglades: “Microbiomes in mangroves and their ecophysiological effects on tree performance under salinity stress”. This work was co-advised by Dr. Afkhami and Dr. Sternberg in collaboration with South Florida Ecosystem Lab (Dr. Ross, Florida International University). This study explored possible roles of microorganisms in ameliorating physiological stress in mangrove trees of South Florida, a critical species for coastal health and resilience. To do this, he surveyed the Everglades National Park coastal vegetation for evidence of symbiotic associations between microorganisms and mangroves in high and low salinity habitats and then tested whether mangroves inoculated with endophytes improve salt tolerance in greenhouse settings. This project provides key insight into whether leaf endophytes from natural habitat enhance the fitness of mangroves in stressful environments through morphological and biochemical mechanisms. The outcome of the project also provides further insight into knowledge of symbiotic associations in salt-tolerant species, which can be applied to restoration and management of coastal ecosystems already threated by sea-level rise. Suresh left the lab to work at the USGS from 2020-2021. He is now a tenure-track assistant professor at Arkansas Tech University.
Elan Tran | Former NSF REPs Program Post-bac and Undergrad Researcher | PhD Student at UC Berkeley
Elan joined the Afkhami lab as an undergrad researcher during the pandemic working with Brianna Almeida on how diversity within phylosphere microbiomes affects plant performance. She was then selected for the prestigious National Science Foundation Research Experience for Post-baccalaureates (REPs) Program and conducted research on plant pathogens out at Archbold Biological Station. She is now doing a PhD in Microbiology at UC Berkeley.
Kailani Acosta | Former Post-bac | PhD Student at Columbia University
Kailani was an Afkhami lab post-bac student and now is in a PhD Program at Columbia. She is interested in mutualisms and microbe interactions in soil. She worked with Aaron David and Blessing Mutiti on soil-microbe interactions and metagenomics. She is also interested in climate change and nutrient cycling in both terrestrial and marine environments. She started her PhD in September 2018 at Columbia University; check her researchgate page.
Dr. Khum Thapa Magar | Former Post-bac | PhD Student at Colorado State University
Khum was an Afkhami lab post-masters student who is now in PhD Program at CSU. While in Afkhami lab, he was interested in understanding the effect of positive interactions on the species distribution and coexistence. Particularly, he likes to work in xeric scrub communities, where dominant cushion species locally maintain suitable micro-environments allowing other species easily to colonize and plant-microbial mutualism ameliorate the biotic and abiotic stress to expand the species niche and range. He conducted greenhouse experiments to understand role of mycorrhizal fungi in protecting germination of Florida scrub’s rare and endemic species from allelopathic effect of Ceratiola ericoids (Florida rosemary) that was published in Ecology. Check out the paper here. After finishing his postbac project in the Afkhami lab, Khum went on to do PhD on pollination at Colorado State University. For more on Khum see this.
Epichloë (aka Chloe)
Chloe, named after the fungal endophyte Epichloë, was a “fluffy” corgi and lab mascot. She was with Michelle since grad school and was excited for any and all attention. She left us in July 2021 at the age of 13. She is greatly missed.
Past Undergraduate Lab Members
Sathvik Palakurty (now in MD-PHD program at Washington University at St. Louis)
Sathvik graduated with a degree in Biology, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics and is now working as a technician at Wash U before pursuing an MD/PhD. He is interested in emerging systems biology approaches to complex problems. His first Afkhami lab project used coexpression network analyses of RNAseq data to ask about the molecular basis of Multiple Mutualist Effects and was published in Molecular Ecology.
AFKHAMI LAB 