Ashley Shade's curriculum vitae (15 Mar 2023).

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Ashley Shade received her bachelor’s degree in biology from Susquehanna University (Selinsgrove, PA, USA), her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Microbiology Doctoral Training Program in 2010, and afterwards was a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation at Yale University. In 2014, she started her independent research group in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University.  She was awarded tenure at Michigan State and promoted to associate professor in 2021.  In 2022, she joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and moved her research program to the Laboratoire Ecologie Microbienne at the University of Lyon, France.

In her research, Ashley aims to understand how to predict and manage environmental microbial communities to achieve resilience to climate change. Resilience is the capacity of a system to recover after it has been altered by a disturbance. Her lab employs ‘omics tools with both field and laboratory studies. Her focal systems include disturbed environments and agricultural soil and plant-microbiomes, as well as laboratory-scale “synthetic” microbial communities.

Ashley has been recognized as an Ecological Society for America Early Career Fellow (2019), and has an active National Science Foundation CAREER award (2017).  She was honored with the Michigan State University Graduate School Outstanding Faculty Mentor award in 2021.  In 2023, she received a European Research Council Consolidator award.
Ashley currently serves as a senior editor at the American Society for Microbiology journal mSystems. She is an advocate of reproducible research and open science, and her lab’s analysis workflows and data are public and findable on GitHub.
 

Ashley cares deeply about mentoring and teaching: she applies trainee-focused Radical Candor in her mentoring style and Scientific Teaching (teaching-as-research) in her undergraduate classroom to support student learning outcomes.

 

Ashley is the parent of two active, young children. Her spouse is also a scientist. She enjoys walking her huge rescue dog Jupiter.  She loves listening to many different kinds of music, baking, roller skating, reading, and commuting by bicycle.