CURRICULUM VITAE

Gerid A Ollison 

Education

Ph.D. Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography, University of Southern California (2017-2023)                                  

Advisor: Dr. David Caron 

Focus: To better understand how the environment shapes protistan communities, I have examined the distributions and physiological activities of free-living protists across space and seasonal and daily timescales utilizing traditional (culture and microscopy), high-throughput sequencing (meta-barcoding and –transcriptomics), and computational methodologies (MVA and network analysis).

M.S. Molecular & Cell Biology, San Francisco State University (coursework; 2015-2017)                                 

Focus: To characterize the Stepwise evolution of a Novel Alternative Splicing Network in Drosophila by LS2 I utilized alignment based tools and novel Perl scripts, as well as traditional molecular techniques such as cell culture, gene cloning, and qPCR.

B.S. Molecular & Cell Biology, San Francisco State University (2012-2014)                                      

Publications

Ollison,G., Hu, S., Caron, D. Come rain or shine: Depth, not season, shapes protistan community structure in the NPSG. Deep Sea Research I.

Ollison, G., Hu, S., Hopper, J., Caron, D. Daily Dynamics of Contrasting Spring Algal Blooms in the Santa Monica Bay (central Southern California Bight). Environmental Microbiology.

Ollison, G., Hu S., Hopper J., Shengwei H., Fuhrman J., Caron D., Physiology governing diatom vs dinoflagellate bloom and decline in Santa Monica Bay (central Southern California Bight). Frontiers in Microbiology

Ollison, G.A., Hou, S., Smith, J., Fuhrman, J., Caron, D.A. (2023) Acknowledging and incorporating differences between methodological approaches for assessing free-living protistan diversity: HTS vs microscopy. (In Prep).

Ollison,G., Van-Den-Berghe, M., Scripathy, D., Campbell, R., Webb, E., Caron, D. The Microbiome of a Multi-chambered Aquaponics System. (In Prep)

Teaching Experience

Developed and taught three R-based modules for Citrus College                Citrus (2023)

Developed and taught three R-based modules for environ biology                USC (2022)

Intro to methods in oceanography Citrus College                                           Citrus (2019)

Global Environmental Microbiology Summer Intensive                           USC (2018/ 2019)

Honors Intro Biol Teaching Assistant                                                               USC (2018)

Microbial ecology Teaching assist                                                                    USC (2017)

Biol 750-Science Teaching for Scientists                                                      SFSU (2016)    

Awards

Order of Arete award for scholarship, leadership, and service                        USC (2023)

William B. Trusten award for service, research, and teaching                          USC (2022)

Genentech Dissertation Scholarship                                                                 SFSU (2017)

NIH RISE fellowship                                                                              SFSU (2015-2017)

Navy & Marine Corps Achievement (Operation Iraqi Freedom)                     USN (2006)

Relevant expertise

Biological statistics / multivariate analysis

Modeling in marine systems                                    

Stats in R programming language 

Applied python

Data carpentries R programming language instructor training

Molecular biology (wet-bench) expertise            

Relevant expertise

Introduction to marine protistan diversity and ecology                     Citrus College (2020)

Algal bloom dynamics in Santa Monica Bay                                     Citrus College (2021)

Marine unicellular eukaryotes and how we study them       Chadwick High School (2022)

Molecular ecology of free living protists 101                            Chapman University (2023)

The ocean is mostly microbe. How do we study them?     Quartz Hill High School (2023)