Allana Welsh, PhD

Senior Staff Scientist

Dr. Allana Welsh is a molecular microbial ecologist with expertise in the diversity and functioning of bacterial communities in soil, particularly those involved in nitrogen cycling. As our lead microbiologist, she leads the use of both traditional and molecular techniques to characterize current and new biorational products, and co-leads development of new technologies aimed at manipulating microbial consortia to benefit plant health and nutrition.

Prior to joining Agricen Sciences, Dr. Welsh was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, embedded within a USDA-ARS working group developing methods to explore the diversity and functioning of nitrogen cycling bacteria in agricultural soils. Before working as a researcher in Illinois, Dr. Welsh was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden. She developed and tested specific hypotheses related to microbial diversity and functioning using denitrifying bacteria as the model system.

Dr. Welsh has more than 20 academic publications in journals such as Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Systematic and Applied Microbiology, and Microbial Ecology.

Dr. Welsh graduated from Texas State University with a BS in microbiology, MS in biology and PhD in aquatic resources, with emphasis on symbiotic and free-living rhizosphere nitrogen-fixing bacteria.