Towards utilizing, understanding, and developing Environmental Virome-Microbiome Mathematical & Statistical Metrics

👨‍🔬 Hi there! I am Dawson Phan, a PhD student in Microbiology co-supervised by Dr. Virginia Rich and Dr. Matthew Sullivan @ the Ohio State University.

🧪 My scientific interests broadly embody employing a systems thinking perspective that merge disciplinary and contextual methods with quantitative reasoning to understand biological and enviromental systems from a wide variety of perspectives.

🧑‍🎓 My undergraduate training (BSc McGill University, 2018 - 2022) spans multiple disciplines in both coursework and research, emphasizing the development of expertise in the bio-environmental contexts I am passionate about (ecology, oceanography, environmental systems), the quantitative training to strengthen my literacy and computational skills (applied mathematics, statistics, computer science), and the integration of multiple disciplines (biology and mathematics).

🔬 My research goals during my PhD are to apply this approach towards telling compelling stories in complex ecosystems with the best quantitative methods we have, and developing new tools to address contemporary problems in the rapidly developing space of microbial and viral ecogenomics.

Current Research Interests

Viral and Microbial Impacts on Ecosystem Metabolisms and Biogeochemistry

Caption: Simplified ocean nitrogen cycle diagram. Webb, Paul - Introduction to Oceanography (2023).

Microbes are facinating in that, by having a wide metabolic arsenal across many different environmental resources, they are able to make drastic impacts on ecosystem nutrient pools and fluxes, leading to dramatic shifts across all trophic levels. Viruses complicate this story by manipulating microbial genomes to increase their fitness by directly impacting metabolic genes and encouraging horizontal gene transfer to drive evolution.

I am interested in understanding how viruses and microbes will dynamically change on both short and long timescales due to global climate change and anthropogenic environmental degradation. I am particularly passionate about understanding anaerobic nitrogen metabolism within marine oxygen minimum zones and global archaeal methane production from freshwater enviroments.

Analytical and Statistical Modelling of Microbiomes and Viromes

Microbiome science is a relatively new field that is rapidly expanding our insights on how microbes function together as complex communities and even newer - how viruses control their stories. As many of our methods are moving towards analyzing partial and full metagenomes, their expression data (metatranscriptomes, metaproteomes, and metabolomes), and their environmental parameters, we are racing to borrow methods from applied mathematics and statistics to characterize these complex systems.

However, due to the underabundance of interdisciplinary training programs in science, analytically and statistically modelling microbiome and virome informatics remains a challenge. I am interested in leveraging my quantitiative training to understand how stories are told from current tools, and identifying scientific community needs to develop frameworks and methods that can pull additional depth and dimension to the rich microbiome/virome datasets we are racing to collect and characterize.

Applied Microbial and Viral Climate Solutions

Caption: Potential applications of phage therapy. Schwarz et al. 2021.

In an ideal world, if we can understand how microbes and viruses function to change ecosystem metabolisms and if we have confidence in tools to monitor, assess, and predict their dynamics, we would be able to engineer tangible solutions towards reducing harm induced from climate change.

I hope to understand how to implement this through community knowledge co-creation practices, identifying opportunities for microbiome/virome-informed ecosystem management, and ultimately, developing tools such as phage therapies that could improve ecosystem health.