Sreejata Bandopadhyay, Ph.D.

Hello and welcome to my personal website! I am currently a postdoctoral research scholar in the Soil Ecosystem Science team within the Earth and Biological Sciences Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA. I work with Dr. Vanessa Bailey on the DOE-COMPASS project with a focus on soil microbial ecology and biogeochemistry in terrestrial aquatic interfaces (TAIs). TAIs comprise a gradient of ecosystem states from densely vegetated uplands, to wetlands near the open water, separated by a dynamic transition zone.

Climate change is projected to impact coastal ecosystems with extreme weather conditions and water level rise. Drying-wetting cycles along the TAIs impact soil microbial functions and, in the long-term, may shift ecosystem states from upland to wetlands making TAIs a unique space-for-time substitute for this research. My work aims to understand the soil microbial ecology and resilience along coastal TAIs using microcosm experiments, molecular biology, biogeochemistry, integrative omics, and ecological theory.

As a microbial ecologist, my primary research interests are to explore microbial responses to environmental perturbations, both natural and anthropogenic, in diverse ecosystems. As part of my doctoral research, I evaluated the effects of biodegradable plastic film mulching on soil microbiomes and soil biogeochemistry. My postdoctoral research in Dr. Ashley Shade's laboratory at Michigan State University focused on understanding how dormant soil microbes resuscitate to plant stress signals, such as phytohormones, and recruit to the rhizosphere to promote plant resilience. Using a combination of green-house experiments, metabolomics and DNA-RNA sequence analysis backed with robust bioinformatic approaches, my research identified microbial taxa that change in activity dynamics in the rhizosphere during short-term drought.