Congratulations to Drs. Carla Atkinson and Asma Hatoum-Aslan who were awarded tenure and promoted to Associate professor!

 

Dr. Carla Atkinson’s research in the field of aquatic ecology is strongly oriented towards the advancement of both basic scientific understanding as well as better conservation prioritization of biodiversity and ecosystems. Dr. Atkinson’s research encompasses a broad set of long-standing questions in ecology such as the linkages between community structure and ecosystem function, food web structure and dynamics, landscape scale patterns dictating community assembly, and the importance of interactions between ecology and evolution for community and ecosystem processes. To address these questions, her lab employs a combination of observational approaches, field experiments, mesocosm, and laboratory studies. The fundamental theme linking these diverse topics in both basic and applied ecology is her deep interest in the role biodiversity plays in ecological function.

Learn more: https://atkinsonlab.ua.edu/

 

For billions of years, bacteria and their viruses, known as phages, have been engaged in an antagonistic co-evolutionary arms race which has given rise to an impressive arsenal of defensive and offensive molecular weaponry. Dr. Asma Hatoum-Aslan lab’s research focuses on gaining holistic insights into phages and the bacterial immune systems targeted against them, such as CRISPR-Cas. They are also interested in leveraging our mechanistic findings to develop novel technologies geared toward combatting antibiotic resistant bacterial pathogens.

Learn more: https://bsc.ua.edu/profiles/asma-hatoum-aslan/