About me
My name is Joshua Stough and I'm currently a Senior Staff Scientist in Research & Development at a clinical diagnostics company. Before this, I did my postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof. Patrick Schloss studying the ecological mechanisms by which the healthy gut microbiome contributes to colorectal cancer and protection from gastrointestinal infection. I approach this using high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing to identify the active microbial functions and virus activity that are responsible for resistance or susceptibility to disease.
I was directed to this research as a result of my work as a PhD student, where I used metatranscriptomics to identify gut microbial functions that protect against malaria (Stough et al. 2016). I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee Knoxville under the mentorship of Prof. Steven Wilhelm, where I completed a body of work in freshwater viral ecology, showing the viral contribution to drinking water contamination during cyanobacterial blooms in Lake Erie (Steffen et al. 2016), identifying novel viral diversity in wetlands (Stough et al. 2018), predicting lytic/lysogenic life cycles in Microcystis aeruginosa bacteriophage (Stough et al. 2017), and assembling the genome of a freshwater giant virus and its three virophage (Stough et al. 2019). While the topics in my research history seem disparate, they are all unified by applying specific ecological questions to large scale microbial community sequence datasets.
I obtained my Bachelor’s of Science and Master’s of Science in Biological Sciences from Auburn University, where I worked in the lab of Dr. Mark Liles developing a probiotic for broiler chickens.
This site
I built this website to serve as a hub connecting the various places I interact with others on the internet, and to house a series of tutorials and blogs where I can share some of the things I’ve learned during my time as a scientist, teacher, and video game enthusiast.
Have questions or suggestions? Feel free to ask me on Twitter.
Thanks for reading!
