Ocean Sustainability
Over 70% of the earth is covered in water, which serves as a vital resource human subsistence. We rely heavily on our oceans for food, energy and water meaning oceans are essential to human existence on this earth. Despite this, pollution and overfishing have caused large amounts of damage to this precious resource. Contamination and acidification pose major threats to aquatic health and biodiversity.
Microbes offer a promising solution in their ability to breakdown contamination from oil spills and plastics. Exploring the microbiomes of these underwater environments is vital to better understand these complex underwater communities which are essential to our planet. Applied microbiologists can play a significant part in understanding biodiversity, contributing to solutions, and encouraging stewardship with the aim of protecting our oceans for now and for future generations.
Ocean Sustainabilty Scientific Advisory Group Members
Connie Lovejoy
My longstanding research interest began at UC Davis where I discovered that single celled algae were diverse, important and very attractive. Since algae are everywhere the voyage has taken me to both Polar Regions and I have explored everything from the tiniest ponds in Northern Québec to the Ocean basins. The realization that algae are protists and most eat bacteria led to my overarching interest in how microbial food webs are constructed and the interactions between protists, Bacteria and Archaea and how such interactions influence global carbon and nutrient cycling.
Technology has largely driven this field and the application of molecular tools to microbial ecology means that it is now possible to examine when and where species of the three domains of life co-occur and even to elucidate the diversity of key genes involved in for example carbon and nitrogen cycles. The impact of global climate change on physical biological interactions provides the lattice of my most recent research directions and is strongly influenced by the philosophy of integrative and systems biology.
Janina Rahlff
"The research of Dr. Janina Rahlff focusses on viral-bacterial interactions at air-water interfaces and their associated surface features. Her research deals with marine ecosystems but also extreme environments such as polar (Arctic) regions or the atmosphere. Dr. Rahlff is interested in microbial metabolic processes relevant for gas exchange and biogeochemistry, adaptations of viruses and microbes to their respective habitats and how microbial communities and virus-host interactions function across ecosystem boundaries.
Research interests: ocean, atmosphere, air, marine, microbial ecology, bacteria, bacteriophages, viruses, viromics, metagenomics"
Michael Cunliffe
I received a degree in environmental biology from the University of Liverpool, and a MSc and PhD in Microbiology from the University of Manchester. After a postdoc at the University of Warwick, I joined the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in 2010 as a MBA Research Fellow (Group Leader). In 2014, I started a joint appointment between the University of Plymouth and MBA, where I am currently Associate Professor of Marine Microbiology in the School of Biological and Marine Sciences and a MBA Senior Research Fellow. I create knowledge through research and communicate knowledge through teaching, outreach and knowledge exchange activities. I study a range of topics in microbial biology, ecology, and evolution. I work both in the lab and out in the marine environment, locally around Plymouth and with samples collected from distant locations, including polar regions and the open ocean.
Terence McGenity
Terry McGenity is a Professor at the University of Essex, UK. His PhD, investigating the microbial ecology of ancient salt deposits (University of Leicester), was followed by postdoctoral positions at the Japan Marine Science and Technology Centre (JAMSTEC, Yokosuka) and the Postgraduate Research Institute for Sedimentology (University of Reading). His overarching research interest is to understand how microbial communities function and interact to influence major biogeochemical processes. He has broad interests in microbial ecology and diversity, particularly with respect to carbon cycling (especially the second most abundantly produced hydrocarbon in the atmosphere, isoprene), and is driven to better understand how microbes cope with, or flourish, in hypersaline and poly-extreme environments.
Elizabeth Archer
Laetitia Wilkins
Currently, Dr. Wilkins runs the Eco-Evolutionary Interactions Group at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. She cares about diversity, creativity, and an inclusive environment in academia. “The MPI in Bremen offers the necessary resources and network to reach our scientific and community-driven goals. We are very excited to be part of the Max Planck Family and the only Max Planck Research Institute of Marine Research.” (L. Wilkins, May 16th, 2022)
Michael S Rappe
Mike is a tenured Research Professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, and is a member of the graduate faculty with the Departments of Oceanography, Microbiology, and the interdisciplinary Marine Biology Graduate Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The overarching theme of his research is to understand the impact of microbial genetic diversity on ocean ecology, and interpret this diversity through the lens of bacterial taxonomy and evolution. He investigates the ecology and evolution of marine microorganisms by combining surveys of natural microbial communities, nucleic acid sequence data, and studies with model systems in controlled laboratory settings.
Andre Antunes
Dr André Antunes is an environmental microbiologist, having devoted most of his research life to the study of microbial communities in marine and extreme environments. He is particularly interested in microbial biodiversity, changes in microbial community structure across environmental gradients, adaptations to extreme conditions and in cross-disciplinary research in the fields of geomicrobiology and astrobiology.
Forest Rohwer
Being a marine microbial ecologist, Dr. Forest Rohwer sees a coral reef as a finely-tuned community in which the microbes and viruses are major players. Recognizing their importance, he pioneered the use of metagenomics as a means to characterize these previously inscrutable organisms and to investigate their role in coral reef health and disease. For his scientific contributions, he has received numerous awards including the prestigious Young Investigators Award of the International Society of Microbial Ecology and the Marine Microbiology Initiative Investigator Award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
David Mark Welch
Dr. David Mark Welch is an evolutionary biologist with a background in biochemistry and molecular biology. His research spans the evolution of functional novelty in metazoan genomes to the role of microbial communities in the health of organisms and ecosystems, and is united by an overarching interest in how molecular biology and comparative evolution can contribute to global change solutions. The focus of his lab’s current research is the novel antioxidant and DNA repair pathways of bdelloid rotifers and the potential of cyanobacteria to sequester carbon.
Emil Ruff
Emil Ruff is a microbial ecologist at the Ecosystems Center and Bay Paul Center. His research focuses on microbial interactions and population dynamics as drivers of community function. To disentangle microbial food webs, Emil mainly studies ecosystems with reduced complexity, such as natural or laboratory enrichment cultures, microbial blooms or extreme habitats. His work has improved our understanding of the sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas methane in seafloor ecosystems and groundwater aquifers. Currently, he is investigating the effect of bioirrigation on the removal of methane from wetland sediments. He has just received a 2021 Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution Award to study mutualistic interactions between anoxygenic phototrophs and sulfur-reducing bacteria. His lab is also involved in projects studying i) the effect of pollutants on the microbiome of sea anemones, ii) the interactions between sulfur-cycling bacteria and cord grass roots in salt marshes, iii) plastics degradation in the deep sea, and iv) microbial degradation of macromolecules in hydrothermal sediments.
