Kerri is a lifelong ocean enthusiast with a huge passion for small things. She is interested in microbial genetics, interspecies interactions, and the consequent evolutionary processes. Specifically, she aims to pair cultivation and genomic analysis to study the ecology and evolution of SAR11 bacteria in and around Hawai‘i. Previously Kerri worked in the O’Malley Lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she developed a transformation system for non-model anaerobic bacteria and investigated the role and engineering potential of the diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) within their genomes.