PhD Student | MIT | wbloxham@mit.edu
Bio
My background is primarily in physics, but I have spent the past few years studying questions within ecology. My primarily focus is understanding community assembly and the ability of microbes to coexistence in multi-resource environments (when microbes have multiple carbon sources to choose between). I am particularly interested in the impact of diauxie (the metabolic strategy by which microbes consume resources one at a time) and diauxic lags (the time it takes those microbes to transition between resources). My work combines simple experiments with mathematical analysis of ecological models in the hope of illustrating simple trends and patterns that could be relevant in a wide array of microbial ecosystems. Upcoming projects include studying the impact of anomalous resource preferences (when a microbe chooses to consume a resource that’s not the one it could grow fastest on) on community stability.
Research Interests
Ecology, Diauxie, Lag Times, Resource Competition, Coexistence, Community Assembly, Bistability, Chaos, Biophysics
