Cole Easson, PhD

Cole Easson is postdoctoral researcher at the Halmos College for Natural Sciences and Oceanography and a research scientist for the DEEPEND consortium. He earned his BS in Biology and PhD in Environmental Toxicology from the University of Mississippi. His PhD research investigated stressors to coral reef organisms, particularly anthropogenic inputs of nutrients, marine diseases, and how these stressors affected interactions among reef organisms. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Alabama at Birmingham focusing on microbial ecology and symbioses, with an emphasis on tropical marine sponges, as well as the development of online bioinformatics tools and workflows for processing large comparative datasets. For the DEEPEND project, Cole is in charge of characterizing the microbial community dynamics of the northwest Gulf of Mexico over space and time, and how these dynamics relate to broader oceanographic features. Microbial communities will be assessed using an Illumina MiSeq next-generation sequencer to capture the environmental microbiome of the northwest Gulf of Mexico. .