Education
2017-Present
University of Miami
2013-2017
Florida International University
PhD Candidate in Biology
Bachelors in Biology with Honors Thesis
Research Experience
Skills
Recent Honors and Awards
Publications
Graduate Student Research
Manipulated soil microbiomes and hydrology to investigate how soil microbial communities are impacted by hydrology and how this effects plant performance
Collected field samples and analyzed relationship between soil fungal communities and environmental variables
Designed, conducted, analyzed, and interpreted large scale greenhouse experiment investigating endophyte diversity effects on plant performance
Software
Technical Skills
Communication
Language
R, Adobe Illustrator, Excel, Bash programming, Microsoft Office Suite
microbial culturing, DNA extractions, amplicon sequencing, multivariate statistics, manipulative experiments, sterile techniques, data manipulation and visualization
Published 4 articles in respected scientific journals, published 1 article for government agency report, presented research at local and national conferences
conversational Spanish (spoken), conversational French (spoken and written)
2021
2020
2019-Present
UM Biology Department Kushlan Graduate Research Support Fund $1350
Health and Life Science Best Poster Award from the UM Graduate Postdoctoral Research Symposium- $250
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Almeida, B.K., Cline E., Sklar E., and Afkhami M.E. (Accepted) "Hydrology shapes microbial communities and microbiome-mediated growth of an Everglades tree island species". Restoration Ecology (2022)
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Almeida B.K., Ross M.S., Stoffella S.L., Sah J.P., Cline E., Sklar E., and Afkhami M.E.. "Diversity and Structure of Soil Fungal Communities across Experimental Everglades Tree Islands." Diversity 12, no. 9 (2020): 324.
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Almeida B. K., Garg M., Kubat M. , and Afkhami M.E. "Not that kind of tree: Assessing the potential for decision tree–based plant identification using trait databases." Applications in Plant Sciences 8, no. 7 (2020): e11379.
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Afkhami M.E., Almeida B.K. , Hernandez D.J., Kiesewetter K.N., and Revillini D.P.
"Tripartite mutualisms as models for understanding plant–microbial interactions." Current Opinion in Plant Biology 56 (2020): 28-36.
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Hernandez D., Kiesewetter K., Almeida B.K., Revillini D., Afkhami M.E. (In Review) "Bifurcating trajectories: multidimensional specialization vs multidimensional generalization". Science