Team

Dr. Daniel Sprockett is a microbial ecologist and evolutionary biologist who studies the assembly, evolution, and function of the gut microbiota across host lifespans. He earned his Master’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology under Chris Blackwood and Helen Piontkivska, and went on to earn his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2019, where he worked with Dr. David Relman to investigate patterns and processes of community assembly in the human microbiome, including pioneering work on gut microbiota maturation in indigenous Tsimane communities of the Bolivian Amazon. He completed postdoctoral training at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School with Dr. Seth Rakoff-Nahoum, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University with Dr. Andrew Moeller, where he also served as a Distinguished Scholar at the Cornell Center for Vertebrate Genomics and a Fellow at the Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease. During his time at Cornell, he uncovered widespread ancient rodent-bacterial symbioses and provided the first experimental demonstration that gut microbiota are locally adapted to their hosts. In January of 2025, Dr. Sprockett joined the faculty at Wake Forest University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

Alyssa earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences with a minor in Microbiology at Clemson University in 2021. Afterwards, she worked in the biotech industry as a Research Scientist at Elastrin Therapuetics, where she performed research and development on drug-loaded nanoparticles to reverse cardiovascular disease. Following her work at Elastrin Therapeutics, she earned her Master’s degree in Microbiology and Immunology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2025. Under Dr. Richard Marconi, she developed chimeric epitope-based diagnostic antigens for detecting Ehrlichiosis and Anaplasmosis in canines. These prominent tick-borne pathogens affect thousands of dogs annually, and current diagnostics on the market have low sensitivity in reliably detecting infection. She joined Dr. Daniel Sprockett’s lab at Wake Forest University in July 2025, where she works as Lab Manager and Researcher studying the ecology and evolution of the human microbiome. When she’s not working in the lab, you can find her spending time with her husband and two cats, running, or going to yoga classes!

Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Missouri University of Science and Technology

Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of West Georgia

Bachelor of Science in Biology & Minor in English Language and Literature from University of Balamand, Lebanon Research Technician at Functional Genomics Core Facility, Duke University

Samayeta (Tuli) is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (MCB) program at Wake Forest School of Medicine. She is currently rotating in Dr. Sprockett’s lab, where she is learning metagenomic data analysis and working on extracting meaningful insights from rat microbiome datasets. Tuli earned her M.S. and B.S. degrees in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, graduating first in her class. Her research interests include host–microbiome interactions, microbial pathogenesis, immunology, metabolism, and cell signaling.