Dr Haylea Miller

Haylea Miller is a Postdoctoral Fellow in CSIRO’s Environomics Future Science Platform (https://research.csiro.au/environomics/). Haylea has a background in microbiology and molecular biology with expertise in drinking water pathogens, biofilms and microbial ecology and fresh water management. Her project “emCells: Developing novel ways to estimate animal abundance” will develop an alternative non-invasive methodology to estimate animal abundance based on the capture of whole cells shed by the animals naturally into the water (termed environmental metazoan cells or “emCells”), eliminating the need to directly sample and impact the animals. This project combines fluorescent DNA tags and PCR-based methodologies to separate cells of species of interest from environmental samples, and use these to generate genotypes of the animals present in an area. This method could replace conventional invasive techniques widely used in both biodiversity and fisheries management.