Kristina Hillesland, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

Preferred name: Dr. Hillesland

Associate Professor

Chair, Department of Biological Sciences

Kristina Hillesland, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

Preferred name: Dr. Hillesland

Associate Professor

Chair, Department of Biological Sciences

Dr. Kristina Hillesland earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University, where she studied microbial evolution. She then expanded her skills as a postdoctoral scholar in environmental microbiology in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at UW Seattle before beginning her faculty position at UW Bothell in 2011, where she enjoys conveying complex subjects to undergraduate students and mentoring undergraduate research. Her research was recognized nationally through her receipt of the prestigious NSF CAREER award, and she was also honored by being selected as one of seven recipients of the 2016 University of Washington Research Mentor Award. Dr. Hillesland’s research is in the area of evolutionary biology and microbiology, she has published 15 peer-reviewed papers, a book chapter and a magazine article.

Education

  • University of Washington, Seattle
    • Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Michigan State University
    • Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
  • Pacific Lutheran University
    • B.S. – Biology
  • Pasco High School

Courses

  • BBio 370 Microbiology
  • BBio 470 Microbial Interactions
  • BBio 495 Investigative Biology

Teaching Interests

There is a vast world of organisms that are practically invisible, yet they play a crucial role in the health of our earth, our plants animals and insects, and our own bodies. Most of us never get to really see these species and can easily go through life unaware that they exist. Even though they are tiny, these microorganisms do everything other biological species do. They evolve, metabolize chemicals, reproduce, pass information from one generation to the next through DNA, compete, cooperate, etc. In my teaching I strive to help students understand these tiny single-celled beings as organisms like any other species, and to develop an understanding of their diversity, evolution, and ecological interactions.

Research and Scholarship Interests

Imagine that you could collect living samples of species like wolves or flowering plants from the ancient past and then transport them to the current time and compare them directly by watching them run or grow side-by-side. My research program does this sort of comparison using microorganisms, which we have propagated in the lab for 5000 generations. We kept intermediates in the freezer and can revive them and study them together in the same experiment.

The goal of this research is to understand how evolution is affected by interactions between species, like predator-prey, competition, and mutualism. What kinds of characteristics do species get from evolving with other species? How does this affect the diversity of species? How does it affect the process of evolution? We do this work by measuring the growth of evolved species and other traits, by sequencing their DNA to find the mutations that occured, and by making mutants that we can use to test hypotheses about which characters changed and why.

Creative Interests

Knitting

  • Serdar Turkarslan,  Nejc Stopnisek, Anne W. Thompson, Christina E. Arens, Jacob J. Valenzuela, James Wilson, Kristopher A. Hunt, Jessica Hardwicke, Adrián López García de Lomana, Sujung Lim, Yee Mey Seah, Ying Fu, Liyou Wu, Jizhong Zhou, Kristina L. Hillesland, David A. Stahl, Nitin S. Baliga. (2021) Synergistic epistasis enhances the co-operativity of mutualistic interspecies interactions. The ISME Journal. 15:2233–2247.
  • Hillesland KL.  2017. Evolution on the bright side of life: Microorganisms and the evolution of mutualism. Annals of the NY Acad Sci. ISSN: 0077-8923
  • Aifen Zhou, Rebecca Lau, Richard Baran, Jincai Ma, Frederick von Netzer, Weiling Shi, Drew Gorman-Lewis, Megan L. Kempher, Zhili He, Yujia Qin, Zhou Shi, Grant M. Zane, Liyou Wu, Benjamin P. Bowen, Trent R. Northen, Kristina L. Hillesland, David A. Stahl, Judy D. Wall, Adam P. Arkin, Jizhong Zhou. (2017) Key metabolites and mechanistic changes for salt tolerance in an experimentally evolved sulfate-reducing bacterium, Desulfovibrio vulgaris. mBio vol. 8 no. 6 e01780-17.
  • Serdar Turkarslan, Arjun V Raman, Anne W Thompson, Christina E Arens, Mark A Gillespie, Frederick von Netzer, Kristina L Hillesland, Sergey Stolyar, Adrian López García de Lomana, David J Reiss, Drew Gorman‐Lewis, Grant M Zane, Jeffrey A Ranish, Judy D Wall, David A Stahl, Nitin S Baliga. (2017) Mechanism for microbial population collapse in a fluctuating resource environment. Mol Syst Biol 13:3 _ DOI 10.15252/msb.20167058.
  • Zhou A, Hillesland KL, He Z, Schackwitz W, Tu Q, Zane G, Ma Q, Qu Y, Stahl D, Wall J, Arkin A, Hazen T, and Fields M. (2015). Rapid selective sweep of pre-existing polymorphisms and slow fixation of new mutations in Desulfovibrio vulgaris. ISME Journal.9(11), 2360-2372.
  • Hillesland KL, Lim S, Flowers J, Pinel N, Elliott N, Zane G, Qin J, Wu L, Turkarslan S, Baliga N, Zhou J, Wall J, Stahl DA. (2014) Erosion of functional independence early in the evolution of a microbial mutualism. PNAS. 111: 14822-14827.
  • Lim S, Stolyar S, and Hillesland KL (2014). Culturing anaerobes to use as a model system for studying the evolution of syntrophic mutualism. Engineeering and Analyzing Multicellular Systems: Methods and Protocols. Methods in Molecular Biology, eds Sun L & Shou W (Springer, New York), vol 1151.
  • SS Nareddy, E Westover, K Hillesland, W Kim.( 2014). Genome dynamics in coevolved genomes: database management system for tracing mutations. Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics. pp 633-634.
  • Rajeev L, Hillesland KL, Zane G, Zhou A, Joachimiak MP, He Z, Zhou J, Arkin A, Wall JK, Stahl DA.  (2012) Deletion of the Desulfovibrio vulgaris carbon monoxide sensor invokes global changes in transcription. J. Bacteriol. 194:5783-5793.
  • Hillesland KL, Stahl DA, and Harcombe H. (2011) Measuring the costs of microbial mutualism. Microbe 6:427-434.
  • Momeni B*, Chen C*, Hillesland KL*, Waite A, Shou W.(2011). Using artificial systems to explore ecology and evolution of symbiosis.  Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. 68 (8): 1353-1368. *equal author contributions.
  • Zhou J, He Q, Hemme CL, Mukhopadhyay A, Hillesland K, Zhou A, He Z, van Nostrand JD, Hazen TC, Stahl DA, Wall JD, Arkin AP. (2011). How sulphate-reducing organisms cope with stress: lessons from systems biology. Nat. Rev. Microbiol. 9: 452-466.
  • Hillesland KL, Stahl, DA. (2010) Rapid evolution of stability and productivity at the origin of a microbial mutualism. Proc Natl Acad Sci. 107:2124-2129.
  • Featured in Nature: Michael Brockhurst. (2010). Journal Club: An evolutionary biologist marvels at how species evolve to help each other out. Nature 464:469.
  • Morgan, AD, MacLean RC, Hillesland KL, Velicer GJ (2010) Comparative analysis of Myxococcus predation on soil bacteria. Appl. Env. Microbiol. 76(20): 6920-6927.