Serita Frey is a microbial ecologist with over 30 years of experience studying microbes in the environment. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from Colorado State University and is currently a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of New Hampshire where she where she is Co-Director of the Center for Soil Biogeochemistry and Microbial Ecology (SoilBioME). Her research examines how environmental change is altering the structure and function of forest ecosystems, with an emphasis on soil microbial communities and nutrient cycling processes. She is specifically interested in how anthropogenic stressors (e.g., climate change, nitrogen deposition, invasive species) affect the composition and diversity of soil microbial communities and microbial-mediated carbon and nitrogen cycles. Her research group works at the interface between ecosystem science, microbial ecology and global change biology, combining microbiological and -omics tools with stable isotope analysis and a variety of soil physical and chemical approaches to examine structure-function linkages. Her research team maintains five long-term global change experiments at the Harvard Forest Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) site. She works with modelers to link across scales from genomes to the globe by incorporating microbial genomic, physiological, community, and ecosystem-scale processes into Earth system models. Dr. Frey was recently named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America.
