Dr Michael Doane

Michael received his BSc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then completed a joint PhD at the University of California Davis and San Diego State University, exploring the elasmobranch holobiont. He moved to Sydney, Australia, for his first post-doctoral position studying the patterns of microbial communities from long-term oceanographic datasets. Currently, he is a research fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia working in the Flinders Accelerators for Microbiome Exploration (FAME) under Professor Elizabeth Dinsdale and Professor Rob Edwards. His role includes managing up to 15 projects within the FAME group, helping Flinders researchers to navigate microbiome studies from sample collection, bioinformatic assistance, and manuscript development. His research focus includes examining the ecological patterns of the host microbiome. He is an expert in metagenomics, developing laboratory and field methods enabling the study of microbes from the environment. He has supervised four honours students and one PhD student.

Michael has extensive experience leading boat and SCUBA-based field expeditions. He is an AAUS-certified diver with over 300 hrs of dive time across 400 dives. His fieldwork has taken him to every continent, establishing a vast base of international collaborators. In his free time, he enjoys marine-based activities, including free diving and surfing.