Dr. Sharp is an Associate Professor in Biology, Marine Biology, & Environmental Science at Roger Williams University and a member of the RWU Center for Economic and Environmental Development (CEED). She received her B.A. in Biology at Mount Holyoke College and her PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego in 2006. She has formerly held positions with the Smithsonian Institution, New England Biolabs, and Eckerd College. In addition to teaching undergraduate biology and marine biology coursework, she runs a field and laboratory research program, centered around the microbial ecology and natural products chemistry of invertebrate-microbial symbioses. Her work has focused on microbiome diversity and dynamics in tropical and temperate corals, identification of antibacterial compounds produced by coral-associated bacteria, and exploration of the microbiology of microplastics toxicology in Narragansett Bay. Since 2016, she has co-convened annual workshops to gather researchers and educators who work on the local, temperate coral Astrangia poculata, and together this group is working to establish this coral as a model organism for broad studies of animal-microbe symbioses.
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