Alex Styer

Alex Styer

Postdoctoral Researcher

Alex began his scientific career while pursuing a BS in Biology from Georgetown University. His early research focused on community ecology in the macro world, with projects spanning trophic interactions in intertidal salt marshes, plant-pollinator dynamics in eastern forests, and tropical biology in Costa Rica. Upon graduation in May 2014, he moved to the University of Kentucky where his research focus shifted to the micro world. At UKY, Alex served as a lab manager for the White Lab and investigated mechanisms of endosymbiont-mediated fitness and speciation in arthropods in agricultural ecosystems. Alex then joined the Coleman-Derr Lab at UC Berkeley in 2016 to study plant-microbiome interactions and pursue his PhD in Plant Biology. During his dissertation, Alex applied his expanding computational skill set to develop a computer-vision based plant phenotyping platform. In combination with amplicon and WGS data, he used the platform to identify microbial community compositions and functions that improve plant drought performance. As a postdoctoral researcher in the Arkin Lab, Alex now leads computational projects for ARPA-H PROTECT and aims to engineer probiotic synthetic communities that can metabolically outcompete respiratory pathogens to help resolve and prevent lung infections. In short, Alex’s research career can be described by bugs, bugs, bugs—insects and other arthropods, microbes, and poorly written code—and he applies this broad expertise to engage with his projects holistically, in the field, in the wet lab, and bioinformatically.