After graduate school, Teal became a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan State University, where she studied how the ecology of microbial communities in soil can change levels of greenhouse gases by either producing or consuming them.

[5] She tracked the stability of methane consumption and carbon dioxide emission associated with the different soil samples and found that sites that were no longer used for agriculture had a higher diversity of microbes.

[9] She has also worked to develop open source bioinformatics software for a range of applications, from RNA-sequencing analysis to establishing best practices for computational workflows for biologists.

[10][11] Teal also continued her research in metagenomics and microbial ecology in agriculture, as well as extending her focus out to study the intestinal microbiome and viral communities in ballast water.

The workshops are geared towards teaching fundamental concepts, skills, and tools to work more effectively and reproducibly with data in a variety of scientific domains.