Erika Ebbs received her B.S. in Biology from California State University, Fresno in 2011 and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of New Mexico in 2018. She is an Evolutionary Parasitologist who uses population genetic, phylogenetic and ecological tools to understand host-parasite relationships across time and space. Specifically, her work focuses on a group of trematode parasites of medical and veterinary importance known as Schistosomes.

She is primarily interested in species of zoonotic importance, which are known to cause Human Cercarial Dermatitis (a.k.a. Swimmer's Itch) globally. Her Ph.D. work focused on the Evolutionary Ecology of schistosomes of waterfowl and their aquatic snail intermediate hosts, and addressed how host specific traits may influence parasite microevolutionary patterns. She is also interested in the population genetics, distribution and invasion of aquatic snails.

Stephen Harris received his BS in molecular genetics from Ohio State University in 2006. After graduating he spent two years teaching high school science through the NYC Teaching Fellows and received his MA in science education from the City College of New York in 2009.  He then went back into research and received his PhD in evolutionary biology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2015. His research uses genomics and bioinformatics to study the evolution, ecology, and behavior of natural populations in response to environmental change. 

His PhD research focused on urban ecology and investigated the population genomics of urban white-footed mice in New York City. Following his graduate studies, he completed one postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University in the Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology Department, studying local extinction in eusocial snapping shrimp across the Caribbean. He moved on to a postdoctoral researcher position at Metabiota and a visiting scholar appointment at Stanford University, where he used metagenomics and unbiased deep RNA sequencing to identify and track novel viruses from bats and rodents in Africa and Asia.

He has performed field work in urban ecosystems in New York City, coral reefs in the Florida Keys and Belize, and tropical forests in Indonesia, which has led to a passion for democratizing science by using the latest innovations in biotechnology to build portable, low-cost, and user-friendly sequencing labs for research and education.  In pursuing this mission, he also co-founded and runs Science-Corps,  a non-profit which sends recent PhD graduates abroad to teach science and build science capacity globally.

Elliott Abrams received his BA in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Rutgers University and went on to receive his PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

During his graduate studies, he used the model system Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) to investigate organogenesis and organ function (Abrams and Andrew, 2005, Development; Abrams et al., 2006, Development). After receiving his PhD, he worked with Mary C. Mullins during his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he discovered Brambleberry, a novel protein essential for nuclear envelope fusion during early embryogenesis (Abrams et al., 2012, Cell).