I am a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. My research focuses on interactions among marine microbes in the surface ocean. In particular, I am interested in how microbes use organic molecules as metabolic currencies and signaling molecules to interact with one another and the impact that these associations have on marine elemental cycles. To investigate the abundance and exchange of these organic molecules, I perform targeted metabolomics on both laboratory and field plankton samples to measure the compounds directly. During this cruise, I plan to measure in situ standing stocks of plankton metabolites as wells as their rate of synthesis via incubation experiments with stable isotopes.