Amy is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In 2003 she came to the U.S. to pursue her undergraduate education at Franklin and Marshall College, a small liberal arts school in Lancaster, Penn. Among other things, her research will look at marine picoplankton, which comprise the smallest size class of free-living eukaryotic organisms in the ocean. In collaboration with other labs in marine environmental biology, she and her colleagues utilize cutting-edge technologies such as a high-throughput sequencer to elucidate the genome and transcriptomes of picoplankton in order to better understand where they are distributed and what their role is in the ocean. After her Ph.D., Amy plans to return to Malaysia to join the faculty at one of the local universities and work with colleagues internationally to enrich the field there.

visit the usc college marine environmental biology site