Sebastian Correa-Gallego

Evolution and ecology are not subfields of biology — they are its organizing logic, present from the emergence of cellular complexity to the structure of communities in extreme environments. My research interests sit at this intersection: I am drawn to microbial systems as tractable windows into how life assembles, persists, and transforms under ecological and energetic constraint.

This includes questions about community organization along environmental gradients, the physiological and molecular strategies — including cellular resource allocation — that underlie ecological success, and the eco-evolutionary dynamics that connect cellular function to community-level patterns. I am also interested in the quantitative and computational frameworks that make these questions formally tractable, and in connecting field-based inquiry with analytical rigor across biological scales.

My training spans cultivation-based microbiology, environmental sampling, microscopy, and morphotype characterization from fieldwork in subterranean systems, together with cell physiology and continuous-culture workflows developed at Purdue.

On the quantitative side I work in R and Python for biological data analysis and visualization, use QGIS for spatial and environmental data, and keep reproducible, literate workflows with LaTeX and Git — progressively integrating formal methods with the natural history that motivates them.