Scott Klasek

I studied Biochemistry and Environmental Studies in undergrad at UW-Madison, and was able to merge them together somewhat in my PhD work in Microbiology at Oregon State University. For my PhD project I was looking how microbial communities in marine sediments are impacted by, and consume, methane from the seafloor. I had the opportunity to travel to the Arctic (Svalbard) a few years ago to sample sediments aboard a research ship, which was a really unique experience.

In my postdoctoral work, I'm using bioinformatics techniques to reconstruct microbial genomes from sequence data, and other statistical/machine learning approaches to identify microbial sequences (from soils surrounding plant roots) that are associated with plant growth. This will hopefully allow us to go beyond describing what the microbial communities are like at a 30,000 foot view, and narrow in on which bacteria or fungi could be useful for future studies and agricultural applications.