Rachel Bell Burten

The microbiome and metagenomics, primate evolutionary ecology, disease ecology, biogeography

I am an evolutionary ecologist and a recent PhD from the graduate program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at UMass Amherst. I was part of Dr. Jason Kamilar’s Comparative Primatology Laboratory and am now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Dr. Todd Disotell’s Molecular Primatology Laboratory. My dissertation research focused on how the environment and host evolutionary relationships affect the microbiota of wild and captive lemurs. I am also passionate about democratizing science and fostering a dialectical approach to biological research.

• Dorsey, A., Roach, J., Burten, R.B., Azcarate-Peril, M.A., & Thompson, A. (2024). Intestinal microbiota composition and efficacy of iron supplementation in Peruvian children. American Journal of Human Biology, e24058. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.24058
• Kitrinos, C., Bell, R.B., Bradley, B.J., Kamilar, J.M. (2022). Hair microbiome diversity within and across primate species. mSystems 7, 4: e00478-22. https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00478-22
• Bell, R.B., Bradley, B.J., Kamilar, J.M. (2021). The evolutionary ecology of primate hair coloration: A phylogenetic approach. Journal of Mammalian Evolution 28, 3: 911-927. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10914-021-09547-8
• Carpenter, K., Bell, R.B., Yunus, J., Amon, A., and Berchowitz, L.E. (2018). Phosphorylation-mediated clearance of amyloid-like assemblies in meiosis. Developmental Cell 45, 3: 392-405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2018.04.001