Naresh Devarajan is a postdoc in the Karp Lab in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology at the University of California, Davis. Naresh completed his Ph.D. (Environmental Sciences) in 2015 at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. After his Ph.D., Naresh worked as an Associate Specialist in the Holden lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Broadly, his research interests revolve around microbiology and molecular biology. Naresh practices a combination of approaches to answer questions surrounding contaminations sources, prevalence, fate, transport, the potential interactions and the resulting changes in an ecosystem’s microbial community.
Naresh’s interdisciplinary research is situated at the interface of microbial ecology and focuses on elucidating how dynamics in microbial communities contribute to the emergent ecosystem. In the Karp Lab, Naresh is focusing on how soil amendments and agricultural management affect the community dynamics of soil bacteria in order to harness their activity to suppress foodborne pathogens. By combining literature synthesis with lab and field experiments, Naresh will provide stakeholders with new strategies for mitigating foodborne pathogen prevalence.