Miles recently completed his James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University where he was studying the impact of patchiness on single-cell foraging behavior of bacteria. Prior to this, he earned his PhD from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile connecting competition-colonization dynamics of bacterial metacommunities in microfabricated habitat landscapes to a theoretical framework of ecological succession. In general, Miles aims to focus his research toward this fundamental question in microbial ecology: what role does space play in shaping processes at different scales of ecological phenomena? In his free time he enjoys learning foreign languages and studying history so as to properly analyze our present moment and to contribute to a brighter future.

Maryam is from Iran and got her undergraduate degree in physics from Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. In the Yunker Lab, she is studying bacterial communities and dynamics.