She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an Earth Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, she launched a large-scale study of the microbiomes of individuals living in agrarian communities in the Fiji Islands. She continued this research with Eric Alm at MIT, which included creating a de novo genomic assembly algorithm for terabyte-scale datasets, developing novel single-cell sequencing approaches, and characterizing the mobile gene content carried by commensal gut bacteria. At Cornell, her lab pioneers new experimental and computational technologies to understand gene flow in natural microbial communities and inform current efforts to combat antibiotic resistance. She is also a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship and Rainin Foundation Innovator Award.