Postdoctoral Researcher

Horticultural Crops Research Lab

USDA Agricultural Research Service

3420 NW Orchard Ave.

Corvallis, OR 97330

gosse + science.oregonstate.edu

I am interested in the mechanisms and processes that generate and maintain diversity in plant pathogens in agricultural and natural ecosystems. I integrate ecological, evolutionary, population genetic, and genomic approaches in the study of plant pathogen populations.

I am working on plant pathogens in the genus Phytophthora in Nik Grunwald's lab at the USDA ARS Horticultural Research Lab in Corvallis. My initial work has focused on P. ramorum, which is the causal agent of sudden oak death and ramorum blight in a wide range of host species. It has caused widespread mortality of live oaks and tanoaks in coastal California and southern Oregon forests and has had substantial impacts on the nursery industry. I have studied the evolution, population structure, and migration of this pathogen to better understand its biology and to aid management decisions.

I am currently examining the evolutionary history of the pathogen responsible for late blight of potato and tomato, P. infestans. This pathogen has received media attention recently with the publication of its genome and the late blight epidemic on tomatoes in the Northeast this past summer (link to Science Friday segment).

I did my PhD in Joy Bergelson's lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago where I examined patterns of genetic variation in the interaction between wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations and the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas viridiflava. This work and my collaborations with postdocs in the lab are published in five papers (see my CV).