About Me

I am a postdoc with Sergey Kryazhimskiy at University of California, San Diego. I graduated with a PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I was fortunate to be advised by James O'Dwyer. My research focuses on understanding the structure and dynamics of microbial communities through a combination of theoretical models and computational approaches. Before graduate school at Illinois, I studied Parts II & III in Natural (Physical) Sciences at St. Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, UK. I also hold a B.Sc. (Honors) in Physics from St. Stephen's College, University of Delhi, India. In the summer of 2024, I was a graduate research intern at Vedanta Biosciences in Cambridge, USA, where I worked with Rajita Menon on ecological dynamics of a large, rationally designed microbial community intended for disease alleviation.

News

• July–Aug 2026: Attending the MBL Microbial Diversity summer course in Woods Hole.
• June 2026: Started as a postdoc with Sergey Kryazhimskiy at UCSD.
• May 2026: Defended my dissertation, "Ecological Landscapes for Microbiomes: Sparsity, Circuits, and Scalable Inference."

Research

My work aims to uncover the mechanisms that shape microbiome diversity and function, by leveraging statistical learning and ecological theory. Broad directions:

Learning and predicting microbiome function

• Sparsity of higher-order landscape interactions enables learning and prediction for microbiomes [PNAS 2024]
  Shreya Arya*, Ashish B. George*, James O'Dwyer
  Journal version, open-access preprint at bioRxiv

Theory-data integration for microbiome design

• The Architecture of Theory and Data in Microbiome Design: Towards an S-matrix for microbiomes [Current Opinion in Microbiology, 2025]
  Shreya Arya*, Ashish B. George*, James O'Dwyer*
  Invited review, special issue on Microbial Systems and Synthetic Biology.
  Journal version, open-access preprint at EcoEvoRxiv

* denotes equal contribution.

Contact

If you'd like to collaborate or learn more about my research, please reach out by email.