Oliver Pines is a microbial ecologist and science communicator. Born in 1983 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he earned a BSc in microbiology from McGill University, completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2012, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. Since 2018, he has served as an associate professor at the University of Oregon, where his lab studies plant root microbiomes and the microbes of buildings. He has led citizen science projects such as Sidewalk Swabs in Portland, collaborated with public health teams in Lagos and São Paulo, and published essays in Scientific American and Orion. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he tends native ferns and an unruly sourdough culture.
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