Britt Koskella, Ph.D.

Britt Koskella, Ph.D.

University of California, Berkeley

Britt Koskella, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley (U.C. Berkeley) and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator. She is a microbial ecologist and evolutionary biologist interested in how species interactions shape the vast genotypic and phenotypic diversity found in nature. Her research program seeks to unravel the dynamic ecological and evolutionary relationships between hosts, symbionts and their pathogens using both in vitro and in vivo approaches. She also studies evolutionary biology, specializing in host-pathogen relationships.

Koskella received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2008 for research on the role of parasites in host sexual reproduction and diversity, co-supervised by Michael Lynch and Curt Lively. Her postdoctoral work, funded by fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), focused on understanding the scale and importance of bacteriophage adaptation within natural microbial communities. Her group at U.C. Berkeley works on various questions regarding the assembly, function and stability of the above-ground (phyllosphere) plant microbiome.