Nuttapon (Nat) Pombubpa (started in the lab in Fall 2015) graduated in 2021 and was a Plant Pathology Graduate student working on Desert fungal diversity, Biological Crusts, and microbiome research. Nat is supported by a Royal Thai Government fellowship. He was also awarded a Joshua Tree Foundation research award to study microbial diversity of biological crusts in disturbed and undisturbed areas of the park.
Nat passed his qualifying exam in May 2017 and his thesis project is focused on using amplicon and metagenome approaches to study the microbial diversity of crusts in Joshua Tree National Park. He has received a Joshua Tree Robert Lee Research Fellowship to perform some of this work. He is a teacher in several workshops on biological crusts.
He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.