Michelle Afkhami | Associate Professor
Michelle (she/her/hers) is broadly interested in the ecology, evolution, and genomic basis of species interactions, especially within microbiomes and between plants and microbial communities. She encourages integrative research on how beneficial interactions and hidden microbial players drive ecological and evolutionary processes at scales ranging from genes to ecosystems and their roles in conservation, restoration, and sustainable agriculture. Michelle completed her masters at Rice University, PhD at UC Davis, and postdoctoral research at Univ of Toronto and Michigan State before joining the faculty at University of Miami’s Department of Biology. To learn more about Michelle and her research interests, please see her CV page and the lab’s research page!
Dr. Eleanor Hay | Postdoctoral Fellow
Ellie (she/her/hers) joined the lab in March 2024 and is a joint postdoctoral researcher with Christopher Searcy. As an evolutionary biologist, Ellie is interested in using phylogenetic comparative methods to understand biodiversity across the Tree of Life. Her current project involves assessing the influence of fungal endophytes on plant niche breadth evolution and diversification across angiosperms. Ellie completed her PhD at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia on trait evolution and diversification of honeyeaters (Aves: Meliphagidae). Prior to that, she investigated host-parasite co-evolution and diversification of parasites at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Learn more about Ellie at her website (https://eleanorhay.com/).
Dr. Ahmed Gebriel | Postdoctoral Fellow
Ahmed joined the lab in May 2024 to pursue research into the interactions between microbiomes and plants. He is currently working on generating a culture collection with sequenced genomes using the MinION. Ahmed is also an instructor of several courses in the Biology Department.
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Vicki Li | PhD Student
Vicki is a PhD student who joined the lab in August 2023. She is interested in plant-microbe interactions under different stressors and drivers of global change. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, Vicki studied how tallgrass prairie species respond belowground to altered watering regimes. Using a multifaceted approach (long term field experiments, surveys across 13 years, downscaled climate data, and demographic modeling), Vicki’s recent research revealed that microbial mutualisms promote population growth and persistence of their plant host across its distribution, yet climate variability – a hallmark of global change – can reduce mutualism prevalence, potentially undermining the very interactions that support host resilience. She is continuing her interest in resilience and anthropogenic change through research on legacy effects of past stress on the ability for microbial communities to support ecosystem functions and provide stress tolerance to host plants.
Alma Reyes | PhD Student & Anness Tropical Botany Fellow
Alma (she/her/hers) is a PhD student broadly interested in plant-microbe interactions and how these interactions may change in the face of global change. She became interested in plant ecology while conducting undergraduate research looking at how agricultural land-use legacies influence plant-consumer interactions in the longleaf pine in North Carolina. Alma was a researcher at Archbold Biological Station before joining the Afkhami lab in January 2023. She is now working on several projects investigating how microbiomes respond to global change, including a study of how complex climate change effects impact microbiome stability and how hurricanes affect soil microbiomes.
Teresa Martinez| PhD Student & Anness Tropical Botany Fellow
Teresa (she/her/hers) joined the lab in fall 2023. She did her undergraduate degree at University of Texas Austin working on epigenetics of Arabidopsis thaliana. For her PhD, she is interested in how plant-microbe interactions respond to climate stress and the cascading effects in their molecular systems, especially epigenetic inheritance.
Anne Katula| PhD Student & Department of Defense SMART Fellow
Anne joined the lab as a PhD student in fall 2024. She did her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College conducting research on areal microbiomes, microbiomes of permafrost, and the development of automated fungal spore finding robots in Dr. Bala Chaudhary’s lab at at the nearby CRREL DOD facility. She is now working on the hyphosphere microbiome – the diverse community of bacteria that live in association with the hyphal network of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. She is spending summer research time at the DOD CRREL facility as part of her Department of Defense SMART fellowship and the academic year in Miami!
Lucas Carbajal | PhD Student & Simons Foundation Graduate Student Fellow
Lucas Carbajal (He/Him/His) joined the lab as a PhD student in Fall 2025. He earned his B.S. from the University of Miami in 2024, where he volunteered in the Afkhami Lab with Grad Student Amanda Rawstern, researching plant-microbe interactions and plant pathogens. As a research associate, he analyzed tipping points in transient dynamics through systems modeling. As a graduate student, Lucas aims to investigate how the distributions of soil microbiome traits shift in response to climate variability and episodic events. His research focuses on identifying patterns of functional redundancy along environmental stressor axes and examining how these patterns relate to ecological stability and the emergence of steady states.
Sundew | Lab Pet
After mourning the loss of our former lab corgi, Epichloë (aka Choe) at 13 years of age, Sundew “joined” the Afkhami lab or at least Michelle’s home in Jan of 2023. Like his predecessor, Sundew is a “fluffy” tri-colored corgi, but a bit more of a goof ball. He likes to play and get into trouble, but is extremely loving. He is, of course, named after a carnivorous plant (as the rule is all dogs must have plant or fungus names … despite the objections of the herpetologist in the house).
AFKHAMI LAB 