I am a professor in the Dept. of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. My research interest involves the ecology and evolution of bacteria, with particular emphasis on the study of their symbiotic associations with animals at deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Symbiosis between bacteria and "higher" organisms (protists, plants, fungi, and animals) is a globally important phenomenon that has powerful effects on the physiology, ecology, and evolution of all living organisms.

What kinds of questions will you try to answer, and why?

The symbiosis we are studying at the East Pacific Rise vents involves the dominant animal there — the tubeworm Riftia pachyptila. Riftia are completely dependent on the bacteria they host within their tissues to supply their nutritional needs as the adult tubeworm lacks a mouth and gut. It has remained a mystery how “baby” Riftia obtain their symbionts, and this question is the focus of our research during this cruise. We will be systematically testing the hypothesis that the Riftia symbiont is environmentally transmitted between host generations. We will be working to locate the Riftia symbiont in the vent environment, determine their distribution, and then quantify the abundance of the symbionts with respect to the total microbial community.

What is your educational background? What lured you into marine research?

I was born and grew up in Detroit, with frequent trips to the Great Lakes on summer vacations, and I was always interested in all of the “macro” biology that I ran into daily, e.g., I loved collecting “bugs’ including bees and watching their activity in my "bug homes” — containers my Dad would make using window screen rolled up and held by tuna fish cans at the top and bottom.

My first real science “aha!” occurred when I was in 7th grade. Our teacher, Mr. Frew, educated us in environmental science, taking us out of school and into “nature,” including field trips to a local pond. Looking at a drop of pond water through a microscope and seeing a rotifer was simply amazing to me! Perhaps, in retrospect, the “environmental science” study back in 7th grade was a life-changing experience, and the initial spark that led to my interest in microbial science.

The clear reason that I am in marine science are the opportunites that I had in college in Woods Hole on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I was fortunate to be chosen for a Marine Ecology course taught there during the summer. Woods Hole is an amazing “scientific” village in Massachusetts with at least five different marine science institutions located there. The course was organized with two weeks of lectures by the U M professors and Woods Hole scientists, then the important part — the charge to each student to come up with a question in marine ecology and design and carry out a field/laboratory research project. What a concept!

Prior to this, I had no idea that I could possibly come up with a scientific question that had not yet been answered or that things written in textbooks or popular articles were not always correct. My project, developed out of a term paper I had previously written, was on the mating behavior of horseshoe crabs and whether it coincided with the full moon. Designing and developing my project introduced me to intensive investigative reading of previous papers, interviewing scientists, designing the sampling protocol, talking to Cape Codders to find a breeding population (and learning “When the lilacs bloom, the Limulus (horseshoe crabs) spawn”), motivating fellow students (and professors!) to assist me and to spend their evenings on the beach wading into waist-high (cold!) water twice an hour counting horseshoe crabs (right through until dawn), ultimately working up the data, analyzing it statistically, and at the end of the course giving a talk on my research and writing it up as a paper. Whew!

That marine ecology course lasted only six weeks, but it changed my life. I fell in love with research, with Woods Hole, with horseshoe crabs and invertebrates in general (bacteria came later), and with my (future) husband. I am thrilled to be a research scientist and a professor — there's never a dull moment and you are always exploring and learning — and I get to go down in Alvin! (And they pay me for this!)