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 Hougton,  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".

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 a graduate student rotator, she is splitting her time between Aureococcus and our new interests in the role of fungi in carbon cycling in large lakes.

David Niknejad, B. Sc.  (Tennessee)  

Masters Candidate, Microbiology

David was a UTK Microbiology major who worked with Brittany on her efforts to examine competition between Microcystis and diatoms.   He has also participated  - along with Robbie Martin - in our collaborations with the Hans Paerl lab to examine the effects of nutrient reduction on microbial communities and Microcystis in Lake Erie.

Now he has moved onto a graduate project where he is collaborating with a local citizens group to establish a baseline understanding of the plankton of the Tennessee River.

Will Schepens

Undergraduate researcher

Will joined the lab in the fall semester of 2023 and has been working with the Aureococcus team.  He has been assisting Emily with projects looking at the energetics of cell growth and infection in the Aureococcus-Kratosvirus quantuckense system.