People

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Benjamin Wolfe, Associate Professor

Benjamin joined the Department of Biology at Tufts as an assistant professor in September 2014. He conducted his post-doctoral research with Dr. Rachel Dutton the Center for Systems Biology at Harvard. Research in the Wolfe lab explores the ecology and evolution of microbial communities in food systems. For more information on his past work, please see his full CV here.

Graduate Students

Ruby Ye

Ruby Ye joined the lab in August 2019. Ruby received her BA from Wellesley College in biochemistry. She is studying the roles of fungal secondary metabolites in cheese rind microbiomes.

Nicolas Louw

Nicolas joined the lab in September 2021 after completing his master’s degree in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia. He hopes to explore the evolutionary mechanisms that influence microbial community dynamics in the cheese rind microbiome.

Kasturi Lele

Kasturi joined the lab in September 2021 after completing a BS-MS dual degree from IISER, Pune. She wants to understand how microbial communities assemble and evolve using both modelling and experimental approaches. 

Undergraduate Researchers

Dillon Arrigan

Mak Boylan

Amelia Carlson

Laura Childs

Axel Ladd

Chris Tomo

Shayna Wagner

JJ Wheeler

Former Lab Members

Megan Biango-Daniels (post-doc, now working at Mori)

Emily Putnam (post-doc, now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Middlebury College)

Freddy Lee (post-doc, now working at Invaio Sciences)

Brittany Niccum (post-doc, now working at Beckman Coulter)

Casey Cosetta (PhD student, now working at Prolacta Bioscience)

Liz Landis (PhD student, now a post-doc at Columbia University)

Esther Miller (PhD student, now working at BrickBuilt Therapeutics)

Noelani Kamelamela (Research Technician, now working at MIT Genome Technology Core)

Kate Williams (Research Technician, now in DVM/PhD program at Colorado State)

Matthew Podniesinski (Tufts undergrad)

Leslie Spencer (Tufts undergrad)

Daman Singh (Tufts undergrad)

Robert Nardella (Tufts undergrad)

Anna Morreale (Tufts undergrad)

Victor Paredes (Tufts undergrad)

Jonah OMara Schwartz (Tufts undergrad, now at Broad Institute)

Ishaan Brar (Tufts Summer Research Experience student)

Lavendar Wang (Tufts Summer Research Experience student)

Adelaide Fierti (Tufts undergrad)

Alexa Ornstein (Tufts undergrad, now at Kula Bio)

Otilia Popa (Tufts undergrad)

Eleanor Shi(Tufts undergrad)

Mira Guha (Tufts undergrad)

Kinsey Drake, (Tufts undergrad, now at Perfect Day)

Shravya Sakunala (Tufts undergrad)

Jake Jiler (Tufts undergrad, now a research technician at Rockefeller University)

Charles Bunnell (Tufts undergrad)

Kaite Zhang (Tufts undergrad, now a research technician in the Lander Lab at the Broad Institute)

Ina Bodinaku, (Tufts undergrad, now a medical student at Tufts University School of Medicine)

Josh Norville (Tufts undergrad, now a research technician atTufts University School of Medicine)

Jason Shaffer, (Tufts undergrad, now a medical student at UMass)

Liam Easton-Calabria, (Tufts undergrad)

Lucas Brown, (Tufts undergrad)

Claire Walter, (Tufts undergrad)

Emily Van Doren, (Tufts undergrad)

Tom Ollerhead, (Tufts undergrad)

Maria Ordovas-Montanes, (Tufts undergrad)

Maddi D’Aquila, (Tufts undergrad)

Rachel Odillia, (Colby-Sawyer College, REU student)

Michael Zalesne, (Tufts undergrad)