Research interest: I am a researcher in microbiology and biophysics, seeking to formulate a quantitative narrative of the interactions between bacteria and their viruses (known as phages). While our understanding of bacteria and phages is extensive, we still lack mathematical models with high predictive power—akin to those in the physical sciences—to describe these biological systems. My Ph.D. research tackled this gap by focusing on E. coli and phage lambda, one of the most well-studied model systems. In my post-doctoral training, I am examining the shared lexicon between bacteria and phages, specifically, how phages tune the infection outcome by eavesdropping on cues from bacterial hosts. The principal methods I use to answer these questions include time-lapse fluorescence microscopy and high-throughput microbiological assays, which yield rich quantitative data, as well as mathematical modeling, which distills such data into novel biological insights. In the future, I hope to extend this endeavor to communities of multiple bacterial and viral species, thereby capturing their complex and multidimensional interactions as in nature, and advancing biological realism in my research.