I am a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Environmental Biotechnology and the Microbiology Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. My main research interest lays in the microbial ecology and diversity of permafrost microorganisms. I am passionate about permafrost microbiology and life below freezing point. Nevertheless, I studied microbial diversity and ecology in many different environments including hot springs, polluted soils/waters, and animal/human microbiome. In collaboration with the Soil Cryology Laboratory and Elizaveta Rivkina we recently collected freshwater and marine permafrost samples in the northeast Siberian Arctic.