Beatrice M. Bock, Ph.D.

Hi, I'm Bea.

I am a computational and experimental biologist who believes that the secrets of the underground world are best revealed through a mix of field experimentation and big data.

By day, I’m a PhD Candidate at NAU (supported by the AAUW Dissertation Fellowship), where my research spans the global, the local, and the microscopic:

 

• The Big Data: I build AI pipelines to read 20,000+ scientific publications to map fungal ubiquity because no human has enough coffee to read that many papers...

• The Fieldwork: I stress-test native Cottonwood trees to see how their fungal partners (and the trees themselves) handle drought and invasion in a changing climate.

• The Networks: I trace the invisible pipelines connecting plants, looking for the first evidence of water transfer in common endophytic networks.
   

Whether I'm building open-source tools to make data science less painful or washing roots in the lab, my goal is the same: to predict how these hidden symbioses drive ecosystem health.