Every year the GSA Geobiology and Geomicrobiology division selects three exceptional researchers to receive pre-tenure, post-tenure, and distinguished career awards. This year we had an exceptional list of nominees and we are pleased to announce that the 2015 awards go to Arpita Bose, Tim Lyons, and Elizabeth and Rudolf Raff. Please checkout their biographies below.
Pre-Tenure Award Recipient: Arpita Bose (Washington University in St. Louis)
I am Arpita Bose, an
Assistant Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
(WUSTL). My general interests are geomicrobiology, microbial physiology,
microbial ecology and evolution, biogeochemical cycling, gene regulation,
microbial metal respiration and Earth history.
During my graduate work and post-doctoral
research, I used genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology to understand
microbial metabolism. My Master’s research at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi,
dealt with understanding the physiological response of Mycobacterium
tuberculosis to hypoxia. For my PhD research I studied methanogenesis
performed by the poorly understood archaea, in the lab of Prof. William Metcalf
at the University of Illinois at Urbana. During
this period I took, and subsequently taught, the Microbial Diversity Summer course at the Marine Biological
Laboratory. I taught the course again in 2014 before moving
to St. Louis and highly recommend it to budding geomicrobiologists.
I was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research
associate for a year in the lab of Prof. Dianne Newman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I
studied photoferrotrophy performed by purple non sulfur bacteria. I thereafter
moved to Prof. Peter Girguis' lab at Harvard University, where I used a
combinatorial approach to study microbial metabolism at the environmental
level. At Harvard my research was funded by the Life Sciences Research Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, L'Oreal USA, AAAS, UNESCO and the US Department of Energy.
My research focuses on understanding various microbial metabolisms. I intend to
apply this basic understanding of microbial metabolism to engineer microbial
systems for sustainable biochemical & bioenergy production as well as
tackle issues such as bioremediation and biofouling. I also hope that my research
would reveal basic geomicrobiological phenomena that shape our planet and
possibly others.
Post-Tenure Award Recipient: Tim Lyons (University of California Riverside)
Timothy Lyons is a Distinguished
Professor of Biogeochemistry in the Department of Earth Sciences at the
University of California, Riverside, where he has been on the faculty since
2005. Dr. Lyons’ primary research themes are astrobiology, marine geochemistry,
geobiology, biogeochemical cycles through time, Earth history, and
paleoclimatology. His career-long interests in anoxic marine environments, early
atmospheric oxygenation, and co-evolving life have inspired the development and
refinement of diverse geochemical tracers in modern settings for exploration of
the ancient ocean and atmosphere and the search for life beyond Earth. He was a
member of two previous research teams within the NASA Astrobiology Institute
(NAI) and is leader of the new ‘Alternative Earths’ NAI team based at UC
Riverside.
Dr. Lyons is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Geochemical
Society/European Association of Geochemistry. He is
also a 2015 recipient of a Contributions
Award from the Geobiology and Geomicrobiology Division of the Geological Society of America. He has been a visiting scholar at the Royal Netherlands
Institute of Sea Research, the University of Queensland, the University of
Tasmania (Comet Fellow), the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Hanse-Wissenschafts-Kolleg
Fellow), Cambridge University (Leverhulme
Visiting Professorship), the Institute of Geology and Geophysics–Chinese Academy
of Sciences, the Institut de Physique du Globe de
Paris, Rhodes University in South Africa (Hugh
Kelly Fellow), and Yale University. He was the first Agassiz Lecturer at
Harvard University and a recipient of the William T. Kemper Fellowship for
Teaching Excellence at the University of Missouri.
Dr. Lyons has served on numerous steering and organizing
committees, including service to the Goldschmidt Conference of the Geochemical
Society, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, and panels within the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). He is chair of the Geochemistry Committee of the Petroleum Research
Fund of the American Chemical Society and works frequently with international
funding agencies, including long-standing membership in the College of
Reviewers of the Canada Research Chairs Program. Dr. Lyons was also a member
of the U.S. National Research Council Committee on New Research Opportunities
in the Earth Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NROES, a 2012 decadal
report).
Dr. Lyons has served in ten editorial positions, including a
long-standing affiliation with Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, and
on advisory boards with the American Geophysical Union and Cambridge University
Press. He received a B.S. with honors in
geological engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, an M.S. in geology
from the University of Arizona, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in geology/geochemistry
from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of
Michigan.
Distinguished Career Award Recipient: Elizabeth and Rudolf Raff (Indiana University Bloomington)
Fossil embryos represent extraordinary preservation that needs biological as well as geological explanations. We are investigating the biology of the process of stabilization and preservation of soft tissues required for potential fossilization, using large marine embryos as a model (400 µm diameter embryos of the sea urchin Heliocidaris erythrogramma). We discovered that two key events are required. The first step is stabilization of the embryo by immediate post-death inhibition of autolysis, the process in which cell cytoplasm is degraded by release of intracellular lytic enzymes. The second step involves unexpected and remarkable microbiological processes. Although many bacteria destroy soft tissue, we have found that some bacteria can actually preserve soft tissue by generating a pseudomorph, a dense three-dimensional bacterial biofilm in which the bacteria consume but replace the tissue. Bacterial pseudomorphs are stable replicas of the embryos – like sculptures of the original embryo constructed from bacteria. We are investigating the mechanisms of blocking autolysis in taphonomically feasible environments, and the actions and ecology of diverse microbial players whose interactions lead to preservation or destruction of stabilized tissue. We are identifying and isolating bacterial species that are potential pseudomorphers of dead embryos from several different kinds of natural environments.
Autolysis-inhibited embryos that have been preserved by formation of bacterial pseudomorphs. Left, cross section of a pseudomorph of an 8 cell embryo, showing the packed bacterial biofilm that has replaced the tissue; right, external view of a pseudomorph of a 2 cell embryo, together with a view of the surface biofilm.
[Fig 4A-C from Raff, R. A. and Raff, E. C. The role of biology in the fossilization of embryos and other soft-bodied organisms: Microbial biofilms and Lagerstätten. 2014. In “Reading and Writing of the Fossil Record: Preservational Pathways to Exceptional Fossilization” (M. Laflamme, J. Schiffbauer, and S. Darroch, eds.), The Paleontological Society Papers V. 20, pp 83-100.]
