During my PhD at the University of Technology Sydney (2019-2022), I investigated microbial hazards in coastal environments, discerning faecal contamination from animal and human sources, and aiding the direction of government bodies in remediating recreationally used beaches. We also pinpointed the sources of human pathogens and their capacity to be resistant to antibiotics, finding that their abundance in the environment will increase with climate induced rainfall events, which poses a threat the human health as well as the aquaculture industry. Since joining the Fuhrman lab at The University of Southern California in August 2023, my research interests have extended into global oceanic microbiology. My main project in the Fuhrman lab has been to generate, maintain and improve The Global rRNA Universal Metabarcoding of Plankton database – GRUMP. We have the overarching goal of providing real data to compare to the MIT DARWIN model (a global model of plankton functional groups overlayed on a model of physical oceanography), which has the power to predict plankton distributions under changing environmental conditions. GRUMP has also been of extremely high impact and has been used to compare real data to models in many projects, succeeding our research goal. It has  improved our understanding of the role microbes play in biogeochemical cycles, their distributions, and how we model their abundances. We have also integrated genomic internal standards to DNA extractions, coupled with amplicon sequencing and analysis of single copy genes from metagenomics to obtain absolute abundances of marine plankton and has been a major advancement in the field of genomics.