Regardless of what self-help gurus may tout, sweating the small stuff is exactly what Carolin Frank is paid to do.
An assistant professor in the School of Natural Sciences at UC Merced, she studies ecology and plant-associated microbiology. She and her fellow researchers are using gene and genome sequencing to test ecological hypotheses. The goal? To examine the role microbes – microscopic organisms such as bacteria and fungi that are invisible to the human eye – play in certain ecosystems.
“Microbes are important organisms,” said Frank, who earned her doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden. “They represent a big part of life but are understudied. Microbes are everywhere, and they have significant roles that we don’t even know about.”
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