Arolyn Conwill received her PhD in Physics from MIT in February 2018, and she received her BA in Physics from Pomona College in 2010.
During graduate school, Arolyn's research as part of the Gore Lab used experimentally tractable laboratory microcosms to explore how interactions between individuals drive the evolution and ecology of communities. Her first project demonstrated that a bacterial cross-protection mutualism can arise from cooperative antibiotic resistance, allowing for survival in multi-drug environments (Yurtsev*, Conwill*, et al, PNAS, 2016). She then studied range expansion patterns in discrete-space and discrete-time systems (i.e. patchy environments and periodic growth cycles) and explored population dynamics and alternative stable states in multi-species communities of marine bacterial isolates. For more information, please visit the Gore Lab website at http://www.gorelab.org/index.html.
Arolyn has recently joined the Lieberman Lab at MIT as a postdoc.