Allison Suddaby

Allison is a PhD student in the Kohl Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies how functional redundancy within microbial communities shapes their resilience to disturbance. She is broadly fascinated by how interactions among individual microbes scale up to determine community-level behavior and what that means for the ecosystems and hosts those communities inhabit.

Before joining Pitt's Department of Biological Sciences, Allison researched Lyme disease ecology in Vermont's Green Mountains and studied microbe-microbe interactions within the oral microbiome at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. She completed her undergraduate studies in biology at Middlebury College and is a current NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

A Pittsburgh native, Allison traces her fascination with microbial ecology back to middle school field trips to the city's wastewater treatment plant, where the smell alone made microbes impossible to forget. She looks forward to creating similarly memorable place-based learning experiences through scientific outreach in Pittsburgh and beyond. Explore Allison's past publications here.