In Dave Mills' lab I have a dual role as Microbial Ecologist/Molecular Biologist and Lab Manager. As a Microbial Ecologist/ Molecular Biologist I interface with research collaborators on and off the UC Davis campus on projects that have a tangible benefit to our lab by facilitating relationships that may result in collaborations on grant proposals or are a result of such. As a part of these collaborations I coordinate and/or advise regarding sample collection, DNA extraction of a wide variety of sample types, DNA library preparation for high throughput 16s rRNA gene sequencing and metagenomic sequencing for microbiome characterization, and carry out the data analysis for these projects.