Professor Trina McMahon

Trina McMahon is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Bacteriology, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Professor McMahon studies the microbial ecology of both natural and engineered systems using molecular tools to investigate microbial community structure and function in lakes and activated sludge. She also uses high-frequency environmental sensor networks to measure important variables that we know influence bacterial communities and is particularly interested in phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon cycling in lakes and how this relates to eutrophication and water quality. Professor McMahon and her team use highly resolved time series sampling of multiple lakes, combined with metagenomics and meta-trascriptomics to explore how different lineages of freshwater bacteria contribute to this cycling.