Recent Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. graduate and former Weitz Group member Daniel Muratore is set to begin the Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) this September. As an Omidyar Fellow, Murature will have the opportunity to complete an up to three-year residency at SFI, where they will “contribute to the Institute’s research, advance the sciences of complexity, and prepare to become the leadership for tomorrow’s science.”

Muratore describes their research as investigating “how fundamental mechanisms of microbial life, such as resource uptake, viral infection, and evolution, generate complex phenomena at larger scales in the open ocean.” Using a combination of oceanographic field work, nonlinear dynamical modeling, bioinformatics, and statistics, Muratore hopes to better understand “how marine microbial ecosystems drive massive global fluxes of carbon and other elements between the atmosphere and the deep sea via an effect deemed the ‘biological pump’, and what roles viral infection might take in changing the quantity and efficiency of the biological pump in a changing ocean.”

Muratore will be joined as an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow by another recent Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. graduate, Pedro Marquez-Zacarias.

Read more about Daniel’s work and the Omidyar Fellowship.