Megan Eckardt

Megan Eckardt serves as an instructor at Western Carolina University within the HHMI Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) program. She has co-taught multiple course sections since 2015 alongside primary instructor Jamie Wallen and additional instructor Maria Gainey, focusing on hands-on phage research and computational analysis.

Her research specializes in:

• Microbial host-pathogen interactions
• Phage genomics and annotation
• Bioinformatics pipeline development
• Evolutionary analysis of bacteriophages
• Undergraduate research pedagogy
• Comparative genomics of Mycobacterium-infecting phages

Across four course sections (2015-2018), she mentored 88 undergraduate students in phage isolation using hosts including Mycobacterium smegmatis, Gordonia terrae, and Microbacterium foliorum. Her teaching alternated between wet-lab discovery (in situ) and computational genomics (in silico) approaches, with 80% of students being freshmen.

Contact: meckardt21@gmail.com