Dr. Kat Milligan-McClellan will discuss her journey through academia as an Inupiaq woman and how that led her to adapting the evolutionary model organism, threespine stickleback fish, for host-microbe interactions. Her keynote will address topics including adapting to new environments, finding a meaningful research topic, microbes on the pathogenic and beneficial scale, developmental biology, and environmental ecotoxicology. Her talk is titled Adapting an evolutionary model organism for host-microbe studies: Diversity matters.