Assistant Professor, Biology & Applied Math
Year Started at JMU: 2023
tiptonlc@jmu.edu
Contact Info
Research Areas
I study microbiomes across different habitats, including but not limited to human lungs, aerobiota, invertebrate guts, and fermented foods, with a focus on bacterial-fungal interactions and how to analyze that data in a statistically sound way. This often involves borrowing and adapting methods from ecology, statistics, machine learning, and graph theory. I tend to have side projects relating to digital humanities, visualizations, and data feminism.
Education
- PhD in Computational Biology, 2016, University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
- MS in Statistics, 2011, George Washington University
- BA in Biostatistics, 2007, University of Virginia
Select Publications
- Wissel, E., Leon, L., Tipton, L. Opportunities for growth in the growing field of psychobiotics. Beneficial Microbes 13, 6 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3920/BM2022.0051
- Tipton, L., Zahn, G., Datlof, E., et al. Fungal aerobiota are not affected by time nor environment over a 13-y time series at the Mauna Loa Observatory. PNAS 16, 51 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907414116
- Tipton, L., Müller, C.L., Kurtz, Z.D. et al. Fungi stabilize connectivity in the lung and skin microbial ecosystems. Microbiome 6, 12 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-017-0393-0