Hello! My name is Elizabeth McDaniel and I am a Scientist passionate about microbes, bioinformatics, and open science.
I’m currently a Scientist at the Astera Institute working on a project at the intersection of fermented foods and human health, where we are exploring how to deliver the health benefits of fermented foods to people and producing public datasets for the community.
Previously I was a computational scientist at Arcadia Science, where I created computational tools and approaches towards understanding diverse organisms across the tree of life, and contributed to pubs released through a non-journal based publishing platform. Prior to moving to industry, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia in the Departments of Civil Engineering and Microbiology and Immunology working on the microbial ecology of anaerobic digestion systems.
I received my PhD in the Microbiology Doctoral Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying lab-scale enrichment systems simulating phosphorus removal using multi-omics techniques. I earned my B.S. in Biology with a minor in Statistics at the University of Arkansas - Fayetteville and did undergraduate research on the natural variation of stress responses in yeast.
You can find more information about current projects I’m working on and prior academic publications on the Publications & Projects page and my contact information.