NGI Welcomes New Staff Members: Rachel Storo and Katherine Silliman

March 20, 2023

Rachael Storo joined NGI on February 1 as a Research Program Manager based at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. Before joining NGI, Rachael was an omics R&D technician at a small biotech startup in Athens, GA, and before that was a graduate researcher working on deep-sea sediments in Mandy Joye's lab at the University of Georgia. At NGI, Rachael will work in Luke Thompson's group to develop bioinformatics workflows, analyze and visualize 'omics datasets, and encourage open, FAIR data practices within the NOAA 'omics program and with NOAA and NGI partners.

Katherine Silliman joined NGI on February 1 as a Research Scientist based at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami. Katherine received her BS in Marine Science/Biology and BA in Music (tuba) from the University of Miami and her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Chicago, where she used reduced-representation sequencing, transcriptomics, and mesocosm experiments to study the population structure of the Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida) and assess its adaptive potential in response to ocean acidification. She did her postdoctoral work at Georgia Tech, where she developed a bioinformatics pipeline for predicting RNA secondary structure in C. elegans, and at Auburn University, where she estimated hybridization and population structure in black basses (Micropterus spp.) of the southeastern US, and led a funded working group of 15 faculty, early career researchers, and undergraduates within the RCN for Evolution in Changing Seas to develop a dynamic website resource on reproducibility and best practices in marine genomics research.