Michelle Neitzey, PhD

Hello! My name is Michelle Neitzey. I'm currently a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoc at the University of Connecticut (UConn) in Dr. Jill Wegrzyn's lab. I grew up in Virginia at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Thanks to my proximity to beautiful natural surroundings and a passionate AP Environmental Science teacher (shoutout to Mr. Bair) I developed a love for nature and its inhabitants. While earning my Bachelor's in biology at James Madison University (JMU), Dr. Morgan Steffen introduced me to research and genomics in her microbiology lab, studying nutrient demands of harmful algal blooms. I married my interests in nature and big data as a PhD student in Dr. Rachel O'Neill's lab at UConn. There I learned sample collection to nucleotide extraction to genome assembly and comparative genome analysis using three different marine invertebrate systems - horseshoe crabs, deep-sea corals, and hydrothermal vent tubeworms. During graduate school I also served as a mentor for the Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics (BCG) program, where I began to understand the gap between conservation and genomics. In BCG I also got to learn more about Dr. Wegrzyn's lab, in which they work closely with conservation managers on threatened tree species. With Dr. Wegrzyn as my sponsoring scientist, I wrote and was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB) grant. Having defended my PhD in May 2025, I will work for 3 years as a postdoc to capture American beech genetic diversity and disease resistance in tandem with the Nature Conservancy. During this time I look forward to working closely with conservation managers, hosting tree data collection workshops, and sampling beeches across the eastern half of North America.