The Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology's weekly Plant Pathology 250 seminar series is presented this week by Cassie Ettinger, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Microbiology & Plant Pathology, UC Riverside.

Seminar Title: "Plenty of fungi in the sea: insights from profiling the seagrass mycobiome"

Biography: Cassie is a NSF Ocean Sciences postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Microbiology & Plant Pathology at UC Riverside advised by Dr. Jason  Stajich where she is working on a variety of genomic, metagenomic and phylogenomic projects at the interface of both host (insect and seagrass) and  microbe (bacteria, fungi, virus) interactions. She received her Ph.D. in Integrative Genetics and Genomics from UC Davis with Dr. Jonathan Eisen in 2020  where she studied the seagrass microbiome and mycobiome. She received her B. A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley in 2013 where she  worked in Dr. Ellen Simms’ lab on multiple projects involving rhizobia-legume symbiosis. Her current research interests range from sea to summit and  encompass questions related to host-microbiome interactions, host-microbiome coevolution and marine fungi. 

Faculty Host: Caroline Roper; caroline.roper@ucr.edu