We made sure to send her off with some Oregon memorabilia.
Last week, BioBE said good-bye and good-luck to Ashley Bateman, who successfully defended her dissertation on May 25th. Ashley has been with the department for 6 years, as a graduate student in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. She worked in the labs of Drs. Jessica Green and Brendan Bohannan, studying the human skin microbiome. Her thesis, entitled “Moving Microbes: The dynamics of microbial transfer and persistence on human skin“, will soon be available through the University of Oregon library.
Starting in 2011, Ashley has had a very distinguished graduate career; in 2012 she received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award to conduct research on the transfer of microorganisms to human skin from contact sources, in 2013 she was named Outstanding Graduate Student by the UO Institute of Molecular Biology, in 2015 she received the William R. Sistrom Memorial Scholarship Award, and in 2016 she won a scholarship from the Women in Graduate Sciences organization at UO to attend the Pacific Northwest Women in Science Retreat. She has already co-authored a number of cutting-edge papers, including the investigation of the human microbiome cloud, a meta-analysis on the indoor microbiome, and a review on human hygiene, as well as a number of other previously published and forthcoming articles. Ashley has also been interviewed and has contributed blog posts on the implications of her work. From here, she is headed to the University of California, Davis, to attend law school. BioBE is going to miss her insight, her organizational skills and attention to detail, and her welcoming personality, but we are enthusiastic about the next step in her journey!