Steven W. Wilhelm, Ph.D. (Western Ontario)

Professor of Microbiology and benevolent dictator

Professor Wilhelm is the laboratory PI and responsible for herding cats, chaos control, wine selection and middle relief.

Steven Wilhelm is the Kenneth and Blaire Mossman Professor of the Department of Microbiology.  Professor Wilhelm is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology as well as a Sustaining Fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). In June of 2021 he was named the winner (along with Curtis Suttle) of the John H Martin Award from ASLO for their initial description of  the viral shunt. In 2022 he was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Gary LeCleir, Ph.D. (Georgia)  

Research Assistant Professor, REU Director

Dr LeCleir came to Knoxville in 2006 after completing his PhD at the University of Georgia.  He is our in house statistical guru, field deployment leader and reigning karaoke champion. 

Along with teaching in the Departmental core curriculum, Dr LeCleir also serves as  the director of the NSF-FUNDED REU site run by the department.

Robbie Martin, Ph.D. (Tennessee)     

Research Assistant Professor

Robbie joined the lab in late 2012 as a PhD student and has been a virtual Jack-of-all-trades.  After completing his PhD he accepted our offer to stay on to continue to work on our toxic cyanobacterial projects.  Presently Robbie is setting running chemostat studies of Microcystis gene regulation and physiology that will feed into modeling studies by collaborators at  the Technical University of Berlin.

Brittany Zepernick,  Ph.D. (Tennessee)       

SEC Postdoctoral Associate

Brittany joined the lab in fall 2018 as part of our harmful algal blooms team and defend her PhD in Spring 2023. Recently she was awarded a prestigious SEC Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue her investigations on pH effects on plankton communities. She will be working on our collaborations with researchers in Ohio, Michigan and NC to examine factors that drive Microcystis success and ecological outcomes in large lakes with a focus on competition with diatoms.  Along with being a NSF-GRFP winner, she held a Tennessee Fellowship for Graduate Excellence.  Most recently she has jumped deeper into the world of freshwater diatoms to try and understand how they bloom in winter months.

Liz Denison,  M.Sc. (UNC Wilmington)       

Doctoral Candidate, Microbiology

Liz joined the lab in fall 2019 after completing a MSc project looking at cetacean microbiomes.  Currently she is working with our collaborators at ORNL and Duke on a project to examine virus activity in Sphagnum bogs that are part of the DOE Project Spruce initiative.   Along with examining the effects of temperature on virus infection, Liz is becoming our in-house expert on all-things mitovirus. Currently she holds a UT GATE Fellowship for her work.

Gwendolyn Stark,  B.Sc. (SUNY ESF)       

Doctoral Candidate, Microbiology

Gwen came to the lab in fall 2019 with an interest in toxic cyanobacteria and fresh waters.   Presently she is working with Robbie Martin on the cold temperature phenotype in Microcystis as well as resolving strain variability that we see between different Microcystis isolates.

Alex Truchon,  M.Sc. (U Mass Amherst)       

Doctoral Candidate, Microbiology

Alex joined the lab in the fall of 2020 where he is working as part of the Aureococcus team.  Along with working on resequencing the virus and some hosts, he will be continuing our efforts to make the AaV virus-host system genetically tractable. Alex was awarded a Tennessee Fellowship for Graduate Excellence when he joined UT.

Katelyn Houghton,  M.Sc. (U West Florida)       

Doctoral Candidate, Microbiology

Katelyn joined the lab in late 2021 to work with us on our projects examining virus - host interactions.  She will be using single-celled approaches to transcriptomics and samples from the Sargasso Sea to tease apart "who infects who".

David Niknejad, B. Sc.   (Tennessee) 

Masters Candidate, Microbiology

David is a UT alum who has been working on our project on the Tellico Reservoir with our colleagues from WATeR.  His work is establishing a present day baseline for biology and physiochemical conditions in the system.

Ashton Stark, B. Sc.   (James Madison) 

Doctoral Candidate, Microbiology

Ashton is a JMU alum and former NSF REU student from the UTK program in Microbiology.

Presently Ashton is focusing on the development of single-cell transcriptional approaches for picoeukaryotes and virus infection in marine systems.

Jennifer Bailey, B. Sc.   (VMI) 

Doctoral Candidate, Microbiology

Jennifer joined us in 2024 in order to finish up her doctoral work.  A member of the Karen Lloyd research group, Jennifer's research focuses on using molecular tools and microbial community structure.  Our goal is to give Jennifer a sense of community to hang out with (and maybe to gain some insight from her) as she completes her dissertation.

Austin Valenzuela

Undergraduate research assistant

Austin joined us in the spring of 2024 to help with the Tellico Lake Project. He will work to continue our sample collecting efforts as well as support other projects on fresh waters and algae.

Madison Moreland

REU Summer student

Madison joined us as part of the 2024 NSF-funded REU cohort for the summer of 2024.  Presently an undergraduate at Pittsburgh, she will spend her time in Knoxville trying to develop a better understanding of the interplay between Microcystis and the viruses that infect it.

Laura Smith, M.Sc. (Delaware)

Research Associate

With a BSc from The Ohio State University and a MSc from Delaware, Laura has joined the lab in early 2021 to help our team working on all thing Microcystis. Along with maintaining culture stocks she will be helping to get our various chemostats up and running (and keep them that way) for experiments ranging from long term evolution influences to the effects of episodic events.