Carolyn Cornell is a Postdoctoral Fellow investigating the factors driving the emergence of brown spot needle blight in the southeastern US caused by the fungal pathogen Lecanosticta acicula. Before coming to CSU, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University studying microbial nitrogen cycling in agricultural soils and assessed the ability of carbon amendments to mitigate microbial nitrous oxide emissions. Carolyn received her PhD in Microbiology from the University of Oklahoma in 2022, where she studied the spatial and temporal responses of soil bacterial and viral communities under increasing land management intensity in a US Southern Plains agroecosystem. Her research focus is microbial ecology, including the interactions between microbial communities and the effects of environmental changes on microbial community dynamics and ecosystem services in agricultural systems.