All living things “breathe”…

But some microbes do so in interesting ways.

How do they do it? That’s what we’re trying to find out.

Our lab investigates microbial respiratory pathways. We explore how these molecular mechanisms drive adaptation to diverse environments and, in turn, how they shape global biogeochemical cycling.

One of the primary questions driving our research is evolutionary: How did microbial metabolism and physiology change irrevocably with the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere?

To answer these questions on microbial adaptation, we integrate three distinct approaches:

• Field Sampling: We sample directly from diverse environments—ranging from geothermal hot springs to hypersaline cold springs—to place microbial metabolism and biogeochemical cycling into its proper environmental context.
• Physiological Characterization: We isolate microorganisms and biochemically characterize novel respiratory proteins to mechanically understand how microorganisms drive nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur cycling.
• Bioinformatics & Evolution: We perform large-scale sequence analyses with metagenomic and comparative phylogenomic approaches to trace the molecular evolution of metabolic pathways.