Dr. Carmella Vizza recently started in the lab as a postdoc on the E-fix (episodic N fixation) project. Before joining the lab, she received her B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Tulane University in 2008 where her honors thesis was about spider sperm competition. Next, she worked as a project manager for four years at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NOAA Fisheries) based in Seattle, WA, examining the effect of marine-derived nutrients brought by Chinook salmon to riparian ecosystems. In 2018, she received her PhD at the University of Notre Dame in the field of aquatic biogeochemistry with the guidance of advisors Drs. Gary Lamberti and Stuart Jones. Her dissertation investigated how physicochemical properties and microbial communities shape ecosystem function in Alaskan wetlands.
Carmella is passionate about biogeochemistry and microbial communities, and looks forward to expanding these interests during her postdoctoral research. She will be shifting her focus to associative nitrogen fixation in switchgrass and is already hard at work, installing switchgrass mesocosms in Michigan!
