Her lab is interested in phytoplankton community dynamics and their role in biogeochemistry on multiple scales – from seasonal cycles to geologic time scales. She uses targeted environmental sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and comparative genomics to study these microbial eukaryote communities in the environment, and how these communities change with respect to changing environments. Through she has worked on a number of different datasets from around the world with collaborators, her primary field studies are here in the Salish Sea.