Shayle Matsuda, Graduate Student in the HIMB Gates Coral Lab, was awarded one of two 2020 Denise B. Evans Fellowships.  Matsuda researches the dynamic partnerships between corals and microbes that play an important role in shaping coral resilience to global climate change. He uses amplicon sequencing to gain a fine-scale understanding of coral-microbial partnerships by examining the structure of bacterial and Symbiodiniaceae communities within and among coral colonies of ten species in both Hawaii and the Bahamas. The structural complexity of coral colonies creates high intra-colonial variability in abiotic conditions (e.g., temperature, light).  Utilizing this complexity, he generated structural 3D models to characterize microbial microhabitats within coral colonies and will use a metabolomic approach to gain insights on how this complexity alters and shapes symbioses partnerships.