FRMS 2024 Keynote Speaker

Dr. Serita Frey is a Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in soil microbiology – specifically how environmental stressors influence microbial mediated nutrient cycling in soils. Dr. Frey earned her PhD in Ecology at Colorado State University and is this year’s student nominated speaker at FRMS. 

Dr. Frey has received numerous awards recognizing her contributions to this field, including being elected a fellow to the Ecological Society of America (2020) for her contributions to the field of ecology, service, and mentorship, and being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in microbial and ecosystem ecology (2020). 

“[The Frey Lab] research focuses on how human activities are impacting terrestrial ecosystems, with an emphasis on soil biota and nutrient cycling processes. We are specifically interested in how anthropogenic stressors (e.g., climate change, nitrogen deposition, agricultural management, invasive species) affect the composition and diversity of soil microbial communities and microbial-mediated carbon and nitrogen cycles. We work at the interface between ecosystem science, microbial ecology and soil science, combining microbiological methods with stable isotope analysis and a variety of soil physical and chemical approaches to examine structure-function linkages.”

 

FRMS 2024 Invited Speakers – Emerging Leaders

Dr. Mohit Verma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. Dr. Verma received his PhD at the University of Waterloo in Chemical Engineering and completed a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University.

The Verma Lab is at the intersection of engineering and microbiology, developing user-friendly biosensors that are being applied to help improve animal health, food safety, and human health as well as engineering microbiomes to improve health and prevent diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and inflammatory bowel diseases.


Dr. Boahemaa Adu-Oppong is the Director of Data Science at Pluton Biosciences, based on St. Louis Missouri. Dr. Adu-Oppong earned her PhD in Evolution, Ecology, and Population Biology at Washington University focusing on understanding how microbial communities are assembled and how their compositions can affect the phenotype of their host.

Dr. Adu-Oppong has more than 10 years of experience in genomics, metagenomics and data science and has previously worked as a Data Scientist at Bayer and Thermo Fisher Scientific. At Pluton Biosciences, Dr. Adu-Oppong designs and maintains bioinformatic pipelines for Micromining, Pluton’s discovery platform, alongside data management and data analytics for various Pluton projects.


Dr. Matthew Olm is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Department of Integrative Physiology. Dr. Olm earned his PhD at the University of California-Berkeley with Dr. Jill Banfield before becoming a postdoctoral research fellow in the Sonnenburg Lab at Stanford University.

Dr. Olm is a bioinformatician and microbiologist that has specialized in studying the human microbiome and fine-scale microbial population genetics, as well as developing tools for the community of microbiome scientists to apply to their research as well.