Jessica Audrey Lee joins Global Viral as a Fellow in the Boundaries of Life program. She is deeply interested in fundamental questions of microbial evolution and ecology at all scales, and her work at GV will focus on how noise at the molecular level inside cells can result in complex behaviors at the level of the population, and how those behaviors ultimately affect the environmental processes that microbes make happen. She spends most of her time at San Francisco State University, where she is hosted by the labs of Ravinder Sehgal and José de la Torre, and she advises graduate students in the Boundaries of Life scholarship program. Her postdoctoral research projects included investigating the synthetic ecology, metabolism, and evolution in the genus Methylobacterium, a plant-associated alpha-proteobacterium with the capacity to live on methanol. Jessica enjoys approaching microbial questions with diverse tools-- considering not only genes and macromolecules but also environment and evolution, pairing wet-lab experiments with computational methods. In her spare time, she practices and teaches food microbiology as a volunteer with the UC Cooperative Extension Master Food Preserver program, and shares her love of science and biodiversity as a volunteer docent with the California Academy of Sciences.

Jessica holds an S.B. in Biology from MIT (including a research project on the ecology of marine bacteriophage), M.Sc.  degrees in Integrative Biology and Biodiversity, Conservation and Management from Oxford (where she worked on fungus-eating bacteria, and nutrient transport within fungal mycelial networks), and a Ph.D. in Earth System Science from Stanford (where she studied nitrogen-cycling microorganisms in San Francisco Bay). She completed her postdoctoral work in the Marx Lab at the University of Idaho.

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