Drea

Darby

Drea Darby is a Postdoctoral Associate in Will Ludington's lab at Carnegie's Biosphere Sciences and Engineering divsion. She is researching the role of host genetics on determining host-commensal specificity. She earned her Ph.D. in Entomology at Cornell University in 2024 where she studied the impact of diet on infection outcome in in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Originally from Las Vegas, she graduated from the University of Nevada Las Vegas with her degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where she worked with Allen Gibbs as a McNair Scholar to understand the impact of the gut microbiome on desiccation tolerance in Drosophila.