Dana received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biology from California State University, Sacramento in 2011 and 2013, respectively. Followed by a Ph.D in Quantitative and Systems Biology from the University of California, Merced in 2018, where she examined the biotic and abiotic factors structuring bacterial communities in pines. She joined the labs of Dave Weston and Dale Pelletier in 2018 and uses synthetic bacterial communities to investigate community assembly and functional traits involved in colonization of poplar.