Post Category: Announcements

Message from the Director:

Congratulations to the Reach Out Science Communication Challenge semi-finalists from C-DEBI: Sabrina Elkassas (MIT-WHOI) and Rachel Weisend (Texas A&M Corpus Christi)! Cheer them on as they compete among 18 others in the Reach Out Semifinals live tentatively on April 13 (4PM Pacific) to the panel of expert science communicator judges: Raven Baxter, Emily Calendrelli, Jorge Cham, and Melissa Cristina Márquez. More details to come.

We are also pleased to announce the inaugural event for our C-DEBI Virtual Meeting Series based on your enthusiasm for C-DEBI community activities at our last annual meeting. Ben Tully (USC) and Jake Weissman (USC) will kick off the series on new tools in bioinformatics on Monday April 5 (10:30AM – 12:00PM Pacific). Save the date for this first of our virtual events to be held monthly during the first week of each month, with a regular rotation of science workshops and professional development workshops. Each workshop will contain about 90 minutes of programming, including invited speakers to give plenary tutorials and presentations, breakout sessions, and plenary Q&A sessions. Stay tuned for more information.

Don’t forget to also tune in to our final C-DEBI Networked Speaker Series talk “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast: A microbial tale of survival within the marine deep subsurface” presented by Megan Mullis (Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi) on March 18 at 12:30PM Pacific Time.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

C-DEBI 2020 Annual Meeting participants pose for a group screenshot

It’s been 10 amazing years as an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC), and we continue to phase down in the next 2 years under a no-cost extension. We now come to the time to say thank you and goodbye to members of our staff who have supported the C-DEBI community, programs and activities that have been integral to our success: Matt Janicak (Data Manager and Webmaster); Nerissa Rivera-Laux (Administrative Assistant); and Gwen Noda (Education and Diversity Director) who is transitioning into the Wrigley Institute at USC while the undergraduate GGURE and GEM programs finish this coming spring/summer. Rosalynn Sylvan (Managing Director) will continue to manage the administration of C-DEBI, so please keep her listed as your primary contact.

We also share here an STC-only student and postdoc opportunity “Reach Out Science Communication Challenge” hosted by the NSF and the Boston Museum of Science. Current C-DEBI-affiliated undergraduate, graduate student, and postdoctoral researchers are invited to participate in 2 free virtual science communication workshops in January to sharpen their public communication skills with students and postdocs from all 12 STCs ($50 stipends are earned by attending both workshops and responding to follow-up surveys). Competitive “Reach Out Science Slams” in the spring will be nationally live-streamed with additional prizes. More information including eligibility, rules, and guidance at https://www.mos.org/reach-out-challenge.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

We hope this fall semester treats you safe and well. We also congratulate these C-DEBIers who have recently been promoted or are starting new positions: Brandon Briggs (Associate Professor at University of Alaska Anchorage); Joy Buongiorno (Assistant Professor at Maryville College); Jackie Goordial (Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph); Jeff Marlow (Assistant Professor at Boston University); Bill Orsi (Associate Professor at LMU Munich); Brandi Reese (Associate Professor at Dauphin Island Sea Lab); Haley Sapers (Assistant Professor at York University); Lauren Seyler (Assistant Professor at Stockton University); Jason Sylvan (Associate Professor at Texas A&M University); and Katrina Twing (Assistant Professor at Weber State University).

And stay tuned for our next season of Networked Speaker Series talks! Dr. Rose Jones (University of Minnesota) kicks it off with “Menu for a deep microbe: Attempts in understanding microbe-mineral interactions in the deep marine seafloor” on September 10 at 12:30PM Pacific Time. Our other distinguished speakers include Dr. Julia McGonigle (Bigelow), Dr. Jesse Colangelo-Lillis (CU Boulder), and Megan Mullis (Texas A&M Corpus Christi).

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Due to the lingering challenges surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to postpone this fall’s C-DEBI annual meeting to 2021. However, to maintain a connection with members of the C-DEBI community to present active research projects and support integrated discussions, we are considering a virtual meeting in November and will invite your ideas / suggestions / interest in the coming weeks.

Cheers and be safe,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Associate Director:

I recently read an article in The New Yorker about deep-sea exploration that made my blood boil and my heart sink. In response, I wrote a letter to the editor, copied below and posted to Twitter. We can do better.

Julie Huber
C-DEBI Associate Director

20 May 2020

Dear Editor,

As I was reading Ben Taub’s piece about a millionaire’s deep-sea journey, I felt a familiar swell of rage building as paragraph-after-paragraph, another man’s backstory was told, shrouded in white privilege and machismo (A Reporter At Large, May 18th). By the end, I realized that I felt as I sometimes do as the only female scientist in the room: left out and turned off.

Ocean science and engineering, like most STEM fields, suffers from a lack of diversity, and many of us are working hard to bring underrepresented voices to our labs, research cruises, and outreach efforts. This story sets us back. While some of the accomplishments of the Five Deeps team are certainly worth highlighting, we must find ways to tell such stories without celebrating the millionaire maverick explorer of European descent striving for records with little technical expertise and a general disregard for safety.

Many barriers exist to creating a culture of inclusion and equity in oceanography, but the portrayal of deep-sea exploration in this story reflect the fields’ origins, and it is no longer the reality of modern oceanographic research nor the future we strive for. Given the state of our world and the importance of science and engineering to our society, we must recruit, retain and mentor a diverse and talented community of future STEM participants that can work in our highly collaborative and team-oriented field. The ocean (our planet, our society) deserve better.

Julie Huber, PhD
Falmouth, MA

Message from the Associate Director:

This past week, I participated in a national #Strike4BlackLives to support the Black Lives Matter movement and condemn institutional racism in academia and science. Based on my twitter feed, it looks like many of our C-DEBI community members did as well. In Woods Hole, a small town with a big scientific impact, we organized a protest march and asked community members to stop business as usual to reflect on anti-black racism in America, recognize ways academia perpetuates harmful narratives, and plan ways to stop injustice. Beyond the march, I also spent time reading about hiring bias in academia, looking at statistics for our academic programs at WHOI, and listening to stories from local Black community members on their experiences here. On Twitter, I saw C-DEBI community members making donations, writing Wikipedia pages for Black scientists and “lab values” statements for their groups, reaching out to their local societies for support and resources, and developing many other future plans for confronting racism in STEM.

I encourage all of the C-DEBI community to support efforts against racism in the scientific community and society at large. While there are many resources and potential actions, this one day movement provided an excellent start for those eager to participate and educate themselves.

Learn more about #Strike4BlackLives / #ShutDownSTEM:

• #ShutDownSTEM: Resources
• Particles For Justice

National coverage of the events:

• Science: Researchers around the world prepare to #ShutDownSTEM and ‘Strike For Black Lives’
• Nature: Thousands of scientists worldwide to go on strike for Black lives
• Wired: Across the Globe, Scientists Are Striking for Black Lives

And from my neck of the woods:

• WCAI/NPR: Local Scientists Confront Racism in Their Ranks

Julie Huber,
C-DEBI Associate Director

Dear Ocean Sciences Community,

Given the impacts and uncertainties from the current pandemic, we would like to raise awareness of a few issues which might be particularly relevant for ocean science proposal submissions in the near future. The current stand-down of the U.S. Academic Research Fleet (as well as many foreign research vessels) is delaying many 2020 projects dependent upon sea time and is expected to create a backlog of research cruises into 2021. We would like to assure the community that OCE will continue to accept proposals with Ship Time Requests and they will be reviewed as normal with the science rationale coming first, followed by assessment of the fit of the ship request to the science proposed, and finally ship logistics (timing and location). That said, PIs will need to be even more flexible than usual about cruise scheduling over the next year or so. With regards to currently funded cruises, we’d like to take this opportunity to make sure you are also aware of the latest information from UNOLS.

In addition, we want to remind the community that NSF OCE is, as always, interested in receiving proposals that use existing data and samples. The ocean research community has made significant progress in getting data and samples into public repositories for wider use and re-use. We believe these resources can be more fully exploited to advance our understanding of the oceans, ocean basins, and margins. Proposals with strong science that synthesize and utilize these data are welcome. Ongoing streams of data are also available from sources such as OOI, Argo, coastal observing networks, LTER sites, remote sensing, model output, and others. We expect continued enhancements in access to an even wider array of data sets in the future with innovations in observational capability and cyberinfrastructure.

Like you, we are all looking forward to returning to our offices and to more normal operations. We appreciate your ongoing support with our review processes. Please continue to reach out to us with any questions you have.

Sincerely,

Hedy Edmonds
Michael Sieracki
Deborah Smith
Mete Uz
Rose Dufour

On behalf of OCE Programs

Message from the Director:

We hope the new semester is treating you well, and we also want to congratulate these C-DEBIers who have started new positions: Jackie Goordial (Postdoctoral Fellow at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University), Cara Magnabosco (Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)), Gus Ramirez (Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Stephanie Schroeder (STEM Director at Carleton College), Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert (Assistant Professor at Arizona State University), and Katrina Twing (Assistant Professor at Tennessee Tech University). We also congratulate C-DEBI Senior Scientist Beth Orcutt (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences) to be awarded the 2019 Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize “for outstanding transdisciplinary research accomplishment in ocean drilling” at the 2019 AGU Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony (11 December in San Francisco).

And don’t forget we have two more Networked Speaker Series talks coming up this year! This Thursday, Dr. Jessica Labonté (Texas A&M Galveston) presents “You are what you eat: a geochemical and microbial study of a 3000-year old stratigraphic sediment succession” at 12:30PM Pacific Time. The series ends with  Dr. James Bradley (Queen Mary University of London) on November 7 with “The power of microbial life in marine sediments.” Talks from Dr. Jeanine Ash (Rice University) and Taylor Royalty (University of Tennessee) earlier this year are archived on the NSS website.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Science Magazine’s May 23 Working Life features the brave personal account of Stephanie Schroeder, C-DEBI’s Education Director, on being open with her diagnosis and how it’s changed her own identity with and advocacy for inclusion. Illustration by Robert Neubecker (neubecker.com).

Dear C-DEBI,

Stephanie Schroeder, our Education Director, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis several years ago. In a recent article in Science Magazine’s Working Life, she opened up about the diagnosis, her subsequent struggles, and the decision to leave high-stress Los Angeles for Minneapolis. She provides a brave and honest account of how going public with her MS has made her a better advocate for members of marginalized groups. Stephanie has been part of C-DEBI since 2012, developing our signature education, outreach and diversity programs, including the Community College Cultivation Cohort (C4) REU, the Global Environmental Microbiology (GEM) course, various teacher training seminars, professional development workshops and more. We are thrilled that Stephanie continues to work passionately for our program participants as she balances her personal health with her professional goals.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Seafloor borehole observatories (CORKs) at Juan de Fuca Ridge flank to be revisited this month to make further discoveries about the activity of life in the deep crustal biosphere. Photo courtesy of 2013 Juan de Fuca Ridge flank cruise AT26-03 with ROV Jason (WHOI, chief scientist Andrew Fisher of University of California, Santa Cruz, NSF).

The month of May finds several C-DEBI scientists returning to the Juan de Fuca Ridge flank to examine microbes in the crustal subsurface. Led by C-DEBI Senior Scientist Beth Orcutt, the NSF-funded “Slow Life in the Fast Lane” cruise has a primary objective to measure microbial activity in this environment. Orcutt’s group will be conducting stable isotope incubations in situ and shipboard to measure various microbial metabolisms in this ecosystem, and comparing these to shore-based potential rate measurements. Leveraging these experiments, Orcutt and colleagues will also be applying new cell sorting techniques developed by collaborator Ramunas Stepanauskas to identify active microbial groups in this ecosystem as well as in the overlying water column, with leveraged funding from NASA and NSF. C-DEBI community members Stephanie Carr, Olivia Nigro, and Michael Rappé will also be on the cruise with support from NSF to lead parallel guided cultivation, ecogenomic and viral studies on the crustal fluids in collaboration with an international team of cultivation and thermophilic spore experts. The cruise will take place May 15-28 aboard the RV Atlantis with ROV Jason. Follow along on Twitter at #SlowLifeFastLane.

We also congratulate C-DEBIers who have recently been awarded, promoted or are starting new positions: James Bradley (Assistant Professor at Queen Mary University of London); Jen Glass (Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology); and Everett Shock (Arizona State University), honored with the 2019 Geochemistry Division Medal by the American Chemical Society.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

This is Alvin, a submarine operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It’s capable of reaching depths of 4,500 meters and carries two scientists and one pilot on each dive. Photo courtesy of Luis Lamar, WHOI.

Dear C-DEBI,

C-DEBIer Jason Sylvan (Texas A&M University) is leading a research cruise to study how microbiology, mineralogy, and geology change on hydrothermal vent sulfides right after they stop venting. #Hot2ColdVents, funded by the National Science Foundation, will go to 9˚50”N on the East Pacific Rise during March 25-April 24, 2019 and use Alvin to sample active hydrothermal sulfides and then leave them exposed on the seafloor for one week and one year to follow the changes post-venting. Learn more at the project website and follow the cruise blog.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Dear C-DEBI,

Congrats to the Dorado octopus team including Geoff Wheat and Anne Hartwell for capturing the photo of octopus moms above and making NSF’s “Most popular stories of 2018”!

I also encourage you to apply to the “NEXT: Scientific Ocean Drilling Beyond 2023” workshop for the future of scientific ocean drilling to be held in Denver, Colorado, USA on May 6-7, 2019. The NEXT workshop will convene approximately 120 IODP community members to develop the US plan for continued scientific ocean drilling without a hiatus at the end of the current program ending in 2023 and continue planning to replace the aging JOIDES Resolution with a modernized, more capable non-riser drilling vessel to help accommodate the transition to a long-term future in scientific ocean drilling. The deadline to apply is 2/15/19.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

AGU Fellow and C-DEBI Co-I Andy Fisher flanked by C-DEBI Co-Is Julie Huber and Geoff Wheat.

Message from the Director:

Congratulations again to C-DEBI co-Investigator Andy Fisher who was honored as an AGU Fellow last week! Hope those that attended the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in DC had a terrific week of deep biosphere sessions!

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

We are enjoying great talks, posters, company and weather at our Annual Meeting in Marina, CA discussing current C-DEBI activities with our active research and education participants.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Let me begin with sincere congratulations to C-DEBIers Jennifer Biddle (University of Delaware) awarded the UD College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award and Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) awarded a 2018 L’Oreal For Women in Science Fellowship.

On a policy front, the NSF has recently announced new measures to protect the research community from harassment. Like NSF, C-DEBI is committed to promoting safe, productive research and education environments for current and future scientists and engineers and will not tolerate harassment, including sexual or sexual assault within our community. C-DEBI’s Ethics Policy also maintains avenues for potential ethical misconduct resolution for members of the C-DEBI community.

Finally, all good things must come to an end. C-DEBI is an NSF Science and Technology Center, and we have entered year 9 (of 10). In the final 18 months, NSF funding for all STCs scales back substantially, and a number of changes at C-DEBI must consequently occur in the phase down. 2018 represented the last round of the Research Grants and Fellowships programs; we now move towards synthesis activities (and continue to support community workshops). We must also eliminate a number of our Education, Outreach, and Diversity programs, but we are developing plans for sustaining some of these with outside support. 2018 also marks the end of CC-RISE at UCSC, Community College Instructor Workshops, Teacher Small Grants, and the USC SeaGrant Summer Marine Science Camp; 2019 will see the final installments of CC-RISE at WHOI, the GEM course, and GGURE. The community college C4 REU has been hugely successful, and we have submitted a renewal proposal to the NSF for 2020. As we approach the end of NSF-funding, we continue to strategize on how to maintain C-DEBI and our community in its next phase. Suggestions and creative ideas are more than welcome!

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Hope you are having a good start to your semester – we especially wish the same to C-DEBIers who have been promoted or are starting new positions: Karen Lloyd (Associate Professor at University of Tennessee Knoxville), Nagissa Mahmoudi (Assistant Professor at McGill University), and Alberto Robador (Research Assistant Professor at University of Southern California).

And a sincere congratulations to C-DEBIers being recognized for their scientific excellence and more this year: Victoria Orphan (Caltech) recipient of the NOMIS Distinguished Scientist and Scholar Award, Beth Orcutt (Bigelow) to receive the Geological Society of America Geobiology & Geomicrobiology Division Post-Tenure Award, and Andy Fisher (UCSC) and Adina Paytan (UCSC) to be named American Geophysical Union Fellows.  Please share your personal kudos if you will also be attending the GSA Annual Meeting in Indiana in November and the AGU Fall Meeting in DC in December.

Cheers and good luck to all submitting NSF proposals due today!

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the NSF Science and Technology Center Program, Discover magazine featured C-DEBI in their image gallery of some of the STCs’ groundbreaking work!

Please mark your calendars for this month’s Professional Development Webinar “Sharing Data: The Joys of Open Science” by Ben Tully (C-DEBI Bioinformatic Specialist, USC), April 25th, 12-1pm PST.

And congratulations to the proponents of proposals selected for funding in our 2017 December call for research grants and fellowships. Stay tuned on our funded projects webpage for their exciting work!

• Graduate Fellowship: Taylor Royalty (Advisor: Drew Steen, University of Tennessee Knoxville)
  Characterization of subsurface extracellular enzymes and the organisms that produce them using metatranscriptomics and bottom-up metaproteomics
  
• Graduate Fellowship: Clarisse Sullivan (Advisor: Mike Rappe, University of Hawaii)
  Population genomics of Nitrospirae bacteria inhabiting deep subseafloor fluids of the Juan de Fuca Ridge flank
  
• Postdoctoral Fellowship: Sarah Hu (Advisor: Julie Huber, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
  Probing subseafloor microbial interactions via hydrothermal vent fluids: A focus on protists
• Postdoctoral Fellowship: Claire McKinley (Advisor: Evan Solomon, University of Washington)
  Evaluating the extent of microbial Fe-reduction and its role in the global methane cycle
  
• Research Grant: Annie Rowe, University of Cincinnati
  Uncovering novel mechanisms of extracellular electron uptake in subsurface-relevant marine bacterial isolates

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Congratulations to C-DEBI scientists Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert and Victoria Orphan for the selection of their PNAS paper, Methyl-compound use and slow growth characterize microbial life in 2-km-deep subseafloor coal and shale beds (C-DEBI Contribution 389), for the 2017 Cozzarelli Prize. The annual award acknowledges papers that reflect scientific excellence and originality and is given annually to six papers published in PNAS.

Message from the Director:

At the end of January, we had our annual site review by NSF and the external panel, and thank all involved including our strong group of undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs who continue to be one of the great successes of C-DEBI.

Congratulations to C-DEBIers who have started new positions this spring semester: Olivia Nigro (Assistant Professor of Biology at Hawaii Pacific University) and Annie Rowe (Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at University of Cincinnati).

And don’t forget to mark your calendars for this month’s Professional Development Webinar “Surviving (and Maybe Even Thriving!) in a Soft Money Position” by Julie Huber, C-DEBI Associate Director, Associate Scientist, WHOI – February 28th, 12-1pm PST.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Proposals for C-DEBI Research Grants and Fellowships are due today! If you miss these annual calls, don’t forget we also support C-DEBI Community Workshops and Research Exchanges in a year-round call.

NSF Geoscience is again seeking input on exciting research to call out for support in their next report. Please comment on your perspective of deep biosphere research as an area to continue to fund by 2/1/18.

At last month’s C-DEBI Annual Meeting, our presently-funded research and education community met to discuss our current activities. The meeting was preceded by a graduate student and postdoctoral professional development workshop “Key steps to landing a job and what to do once you’ve been offered the position.” See the agenda.

Another season of our Networked Speaker Series is over and we thank the presenters for their great talks connecting all of us interested “deeply” or broadly in the deep biosphere (watch the archived talks online). Nominate an early career investigator doing exciting research with effective communication for next season’s series!

Going to the 2017 AGU Fall meeting this month? Join DCO and C-DEBI for a poster swarm of Session B11G “Unearthing the Metabolic Potential of Microorganisms in the Deep Subsurface Biosphere II Posters” on Monday December 11. Gather at poster B11G-1729 at 10AM to hear short presentations of posters in the session followed by questions and discussion. See additional sessions of interest. While you are at the meeting, share your photos, scientific ponderings, and new found knowledge with us on Twitter! Please tag any NSF-funded C-DEBI research with #NSFfunded, @NSF_GEO and @deepbiosphere. Both C-DEBI and NSF are prepared to share your Tweets!”

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

That’s a wrap! After almost 3 weeks on site at North Pond, a diverse team of microbiologists, geochemists, hydrogeologists, and virologists are leaving station and heading to Barbados! We look forward to learning what they’ve discovered!

The special issue of Frontiers in Microbiology, Recent Advances in Geomicrobiology of the Ocean Crust, is now available as an “ebook.” These twenty-two papers that came out earlier this year in tribute to the late Dr. Katrina J. Edwards brings together recent discoveries of the microbial presence, diversity and activity in these environments, with analysis of the implications for global systems.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

Our annual call for research and fellowship proposals is posted! We continue to support research grants and graduate student and postdoctoral fellowships that will significantly advance C-DEBI’s central research agenda to investigate the subseafloor biosphere deep in marine sediment and oceanic crust, including on “expeditions of opportunity.” C-DEBI welcomes proposals from applicants who would enhance diversity in C-DEBI and STEM fields. The deadline for this call is December 1, 2017. Note, there is no call for education grants this year. I look forward to continued, strong engagement by the community through our many C-DEBI programs and activities.

As the culminating program for the North Pond field program – a major field site within the C-DEBI portfolio – a team of scientists is heading back to the subseafloor “CORK” observatory network in October to assess the deep biosphere living in young, cool, and oxic basaltic oceanic crust. This observatory network was installed in 2011 during IODP Expedition 336 led by former C-DEBI Director Katrina Edwards. C-DEBI scientists led by Executive Committee member Dr. Geoff Wheat will be visiting the observatories with the ROV Jason to collect pristine subsurface fluid samples and finally recover the sensors and incubation experiments that have been cooking in the subsurface for the past 6 years. This return mission is funded by the National Science Foundation, with add-on funding for fluid sampling to look at microbe-carbon and virus interactions. Cruise participants will also be running a ship-to-shore outreach program. Follow #NorthPond2017 on Twitter for the latest updates.

In this summer’s Global Environmental Microbiology (GEM) course and Community College Cultivation Cohort (C4) REU, we had another enthusiastic and bright class of undergraduate students that we will be introducing you to in our newsletters, sharing their stories and aspirations. We are proud to have been a step in their scientific pathway.  Please keep your eye out for their spotlights!

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director:

After an exciting 10-year run, the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University in Denmark officially closes its doors at the end of this month. Under the leadership of Bo Barker Jørgensen, this center made exciting discoveries on microbial life in the seabed, including in the sediment sulfur cycle, life at the energetic limits, and electromicrobiology, to name but a few. The center may be sunsetting, but we look forward to many future collaborations with our friends from across the Atlantic.

And remember to tune in to our webinars this season! Emily Estes is our next Networked Speaker on November 2 ( Organic carbon utilization and preservation in a carbon desert), and Andy Fisher is our next Professional Development speaker on October 24 (Title TBD). If you missed the latest ones, please check out the fantastic talks by Gus Ramirez ( Microbial Neter-Khertet: Life and death post-entombment) and Karen Lloyd (How to Negotiate in Academia) archived on the website.

Finally, congratulations to Heather Fullerton starting this fall as an Assistant Professor in Biology at the College of Charleston. We are enthusiastic for the group of C-DEBIers starting new positions this fall, and look forward to continuing to share their and others’ good news.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Hope you are having a good start to your semester – we especially wish the same to C-DEBIers who we know have started new positions: Rika Anderson (Assistant Professor at Carleton College), Stephanie Carr (Assistant Professor at Hartwick College), Kat Dawson (Assistant Professor at Rutgers University), Caroline Fortunato (Assistant Professor at Wilkes University), Anna Kaster (Professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Ileana Perez-Rodriguez (Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania), Mark Torres (Assistant Professor at Rice University), Rosa Léon-Zayas (Assistant Professor at Willamette University) and Senior Scientist Steve Finkel (College Dean of Graduate and Professional Education at the University of Southern California).

August 24, 11am PT:Karen G. Lloyd (University of Tennessee) leads the next C-DEBI Professional Development Webinar on “How to Negotiate in Academia,” covering why negotiation is essential, tips for how to do so successfully and what to expect from post-doc and assistant professorship job negotiations.

September 7, 12:30pm PT: Dr. Gustavo Ramírez (University of Rhode Island) will give the next Networked Speaker Series Seminar on “Microbial Neter-Khertet: Life and death post-entombment.” Abstract: Deep ocean sediment is a diffusion-limited environment where microbial inhabitants persist despite extreme temporal, physical and nutritional isolation from the ocean above. Burial time increases with sediment depth and, unsurprisingly, community richness, diversity, cell abundance and metabolic activity drop significantly with sediment age, implying both a steep selection curve and concomitant mass death. The extent to which benthic necromass (fragments of cadaverous cells), specifically extracellular DNA, a molecular fossil, may affect environmental sequencing surveys is a critical question that has received little attention. Reasons for this neglect are i) DNA is generally believed to have a short molecular half-life and ii) extracellular DNA represents dissolved C, N and P which should be readily metabolized by active microbes. The scarcity of methods for assessing microbial viability in complex environmental samples further confounds this issue. I interrogated Arctic and Pacific sediments for the presence of detrital DNA using Propidium Monoazide, a photo-active DNA intercalating dye that cannot penetrate intact prokaryotic membranes. This approach employs membrane integrity, a prerequisite for chemiosmotic potential and ATP production, as a viability metric. I detected statistically significant extracellular 16S rRNA gene loads in shallow sediment horizons, but not deep horizons. Measures of Alpha- and Beta-diversity for intra-and total-16rRNA gene pools are somewhat variable. Diversity trends are generally similar for both DNA pools, but noisier at shallow depths.

Message from the Director:

In tribute to the late Dr. Katrina J. Edwards, who pioneered C-DEBI and the study of microbes that “rust the crust”, a special issue of twenty-two papers, Recent Advances in Geomicrobiology of the Ocean Crust, has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology. Editors Beth Orcutt, Jason Sylvan and Cara Santelli are just a few of the many in our community inspired by her achievements in the exploration of the deep biosphere.

And a round of hearty congratulations to our C-DEBIers at (or formerly at) the University of Delaware: Dr. Jen Biddle, Dr. Rosa Leon Zayas and Christopher Petrone. Jen Biddle and her co-investigators have been awarded a prestigious $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to explore how environmental factors may affect the genetics of microbes. Rosa Leon Zayas, a former C-DEBI postdoctoral fellow, begins her tenure track position at Willamette University in the Department of Biology this fall. And Chris Petrone’s C-DEBI education grant Project VIDEO, developed with Lisa Tossey, Jen Biddle and Rosa Leon Zayas, has won two national awards for audiovisual communications and electronic media. Congratulations to all of you and the C-DEBIers who contributed to the guest 15 Second Science spots!

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

To help preserve deep biosphere methods for use in future projects, the Center strongly encourages you to describe your lab and software-based methods using protocols.io, and to link them to our group page at https://www.protocols.io/groups/center-for-dark-energy-biosphere-investigations. The protocols.io website provides an easy-to-use platform to share reproducible, step-by-step scientific methods. So far, our group has 10 protocols up and we hope to preserve as many methods as possible from the community, including both successful and failed protocols. Please contact Matt Janicak <janicak@usc.edu> if you have any questions about using the site and we hope to see your contributions up soon.

Message from the Director:

Congratulations to Dr. Andy Fisher, C-DEBI Co-Investigator, recognized by the University of California Santa Cruz with the 2016-17 Excellence in Teaching Award (one of seven university-wide).

And good luck to our newest deep biosphere researchers getting started in C-DEBI’s summer Education & Diversity programs! These include our Community College Cultivation Cohort (C4) REU at USC, where community college students cultivate and characterize unknown microbes from the deep; the Community College Research Internship for Scientific Engagment (CC-RISE ) for community college students at WHOI and UCSC; the Geobiology and Genomics Undergraduate Research Experience (GGURE) internship at USC; the undergraduate, field-based Global Environmental Microbiology Course at USC and Wrigley Institute; the Summer Marine Lab Experience for high school students from across the country at Wrigley; and the Seafloor Science ROV day camp for elementary and Jr. High students at several locations in the Monterey Bay area.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Message from the Director

Our Associate Director, Dr. Julie Huber begins her new position in Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution this month, so please update your address books to jhuber@whoi.edu!  A round of congratulations also to Dr. Jen Biddle awarded tenure in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of Delaware and Dr. Laura Lapham awarded tenure at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. And if you are at this week’s ASM Microbe meeting, please congratulate C-DEBI Senior Scientist Dr. Steve Finkel who will receive the William A. Hinton Research Training Award on June 4 for outstanding contributions toward fostering the research training of underrepresented minorities in microbiology. Steve’s GGURE undergraduate research internship program is one of C-DEBI’s flagship STEM-retention programs.

We are also pleased to share that the International Ocean Discovery Program has just put Guaymas Basin deep drilling led by Dr. Andreas Teske on the agenda for late 2019, so keep your eye out for opportunities to sail on Expedition 385: Guaymas Basic Tectonics and Biosphere!
Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Speakers:Donna Blackman (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Beth Orcutt (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences). For our upcoming C-DEBI Professional Development Webinar, we have teamed up with the Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s Marine Geoscience Leadership Symposium (MGLS) to bring you a comprehensive webinar on proposal preparation. The webinar will focus on topics related to preparing research proposals by providing advice on writing, constructing planning timelines, managing a team through the process, and preparing a budget. Please register to access the webinar link and receive last-minute email reminders!

Congratulations to Dr. Anne Dekas at Stanford University, named one of the 2017 Simons Foundation Early Career Investigators in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution.  Dr. Dekas is a C-DEBI scientist who studies the microbiology and biogeochemistry of the deep sea, and with this award, will quantify microbial activity in the deep sea using NanoSIMS.

And please tune in to our next Networked Speaker Series talk on 5/11 by Dr. Andrew Steen at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville presenting “What Heterotrophs Want: Using extracellular enzyme assays to probe the lifestyle of heterotrophic microorganisms in subsurface sediments.”

Message from the Director:

Looking forward to another great Networked Speaker Series talk on 5/11: Dr. Andrew Steen, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville presents “What Heterotrophs Want: Using extracellular enzyme assays to probe the lifestyle of heterotrophic microorganisms in subsurface sediments.” The intent of these half-hour talks is to connect all of us interested “deeply” or broadly in the deep biosphere. Note, these early career investigators were nominated by members of the community for their exciting research and effective communication!

If you missed this season’s previous talk, Dr. Annie Rowe: Eating rocks! Investigating microbial energy conservation with microbes that utilize solid mineral electron donors, you can watch it now online.

Cheers,

Jan Amend

C-DEBI Director

Do you have questions like:

• How do I put together (or understand) a budget?
• How do I improve my work-life balance?
• How can I use social media to help my science career?

If so, then this webinar series is for you!

Presenting the first of C-DEBI’s new professional development webinar series:

Leveraging Social Media

• Are you using social media to network and promote your science?
• Learn why you should and how to do it
• Led by Jen Biddle, Assistant Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, & Environment, University of Delaware
• Thursday, April 13, 12:00pm PST, connection link to follow

Our 2017 Networked Speaker Series speakers have been selected!  Please mark your calendars for this online seminar series to connect all of us interested “deeply” or broadly in the deep biosphere. Next month’s talk is by Dr. Annie Rowe at the University of Southern California, who will present “Eating rocks! Investigating microbial energy conservation with microbes that utilize solid mineral electron donors” on 3/9/17 at 9:30AM Hawaii Time/12:30PM PST/3:30PM EST.

Congratulations to the proponents of proposals selected for funding in our 2016 December call for research and education grants and fellowships. Stay tuned on our funded projects webpage for their exciting work in Phase 2 of C-DEBI!

• Graduate Fellowship: Lilja Strang (Advisor: Craig Moyer, Western Washington University)
  Insights into the genomics of deep subsurface vs. near surface Thermococcus isolates
• Postdoctoral Fellowship: Jeanine Ash (Advisor: Caroline Masiello, Rice University)
  Tracing deep biosphere methane cycling with clumped isotopes
• Postdoctoral Fellowship: Jesse Colangelo-Lillis (Advisor: Boswell Wing, University of Colorado Boulder)
  MEGA Analogue for Subsurface Sedimentary In-Vivo Evolution (MASSIVE) Plate
• Postdoctoral Fellowship: Abhiney Jain (Advisor: Jeff Gralnick, University of Minnesota)
  Taming a Zetaproteobacteria using genetics to understand iron cycling in the deep ocean biosphere: Mariprofundus ferrooxydans PV-1 as a model organism
• Postdoctoral Fellowship: Alma Parada (Advisor: Anne Dekas, Stanford University)
  Linking genetic diversity in benthic marine archaea to functional variability and contributions to carbon cycling
• Research Grant: John Dore and Eric Boyd, Montana State University
  Microbial anabolism in subseafloor sediments of the North Atlantic subtropical gyre: carbon vs. phosphorus limitation
• Research Grant: Dionysis Foustoukos and Costantino Vetriani, Carnegie Institution of Washington and Rutgers University
  Symbiotic Growth of Piezophilic Deep-sea Vent Bacteria
• Research Grant: Jessica Labonte and Peter van Hengstum, Texas A&M University Galveston
  Subseafloor prokaryotic and viral communities and interactions in anoxic marine basins: a case study from a 3000-year old stratigraphic succession
• Education Grant: Sharon Cooper, LDEO-Columbia University
  Stories from the Deep Biosphere: An Interactive Science Experience

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

There are plans afoot to create a new federal 10-year ocean research plan (https://www.nsf.gov/geo/oce/orp/) to replace the plan created in 2007 and updated in 2013. This new plan will guide future federal funding, so it is vital that the science that we think is important is considered in the plan. To refresh your memory, C-DEBI scientists provided numerous comments on the 2013 update, and the impacts were undeniable in the resulting document. Now is the time to do that again! The public comment period on the draft societal themes and research goals is open until January 1, so there is not much time. It is only 7 pages, so take 10 minutes to read it.

We appreciate your commitment to C-DEBI and all its science, education, and outreach efforts. We are stronger together, evidenced again by the great interest in the latest call for research and education grants (13 graduate fellowship, 15 postdoc fellowship, 9 research, 3 education), which are currently being reviewed by C-DEBI Leadership and our E&O Steering Committee.

Happy holidays and best wishes for the new year!

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

Please join me in welcoming Gwen Noda as C-DEBI Diversity Director who in her few weeks at USC, has dived into leading our diversity efforts to serve our students, postdocs, faculty, and other participants at USC and across the nation. Ms. Noda is a Los Angeles native who earned her B.S. in Marine Biology and M.A. in Biology both from UCLA with a research focus on benthic aquatic invertebrates. She brings an extensive background in informal education in the field and classroom to support and grow our education and outreach programs, e.g., as former Co-Director of the Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence COSEE-West and coordinator of the FLOW Citizen Science Monitoring Program at Bolsa Chica Wetlands and State Beach for Amigos de Bolsa Chica among others.

We are also excited by a recent Nature Communications paper proposing a new bacterial phyla classification that highlights several C-DEBI persons of interest!  “Edwardsbacteria”, “Wallbacteria”, and “Nealsonbacteria” nod to our former Director Katrina Edwards, current External Advisory Board member Judy Wall, and colleague and grant recipient Ken Nealson. For details see the Banfield lab paper Thousands of microbial genomes shed light on interconnected biogeochemical processes in an aquifer system.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

We have many things to celebrate! First, congratulations to USC graduate student Gus Ramirez for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis; he now embarks on a C-DEBI Postdoctoral Fellowship with Steve D’Hondt at URI. Congratulations also to C-DEBI Senior Scientist Steve Finkel, who will receive the American Society for Microbiology’s 2017 William A. Hinton Research Training Award for outstanding contributions toward fostering the research training of underrepresented minorities in microbiology. Steve’s GGURE undergraduate research internship program is one of C-DEBI’s flagship STEM-retention programs.

We are also extraordinarily proud of C-DEBI Senior Scientist Victoria Orphan, recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship*. The 5-year “genius grant” is meant to encourage creative scientists, artists and other thinkers who are pushing the boundaries of their fields. Victoria is certainly doing that for C-DEBI. A true Californian, she spent her childhood in San Diego, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from UC Santa Barbara, did a stint at NASA Ames in Mountain View, and since 2004 has been on the faculty at Caltech—“Victoria, do you realize there are 49 other states and, according to the United Nations, 192 other countries?” She is a role model for all of us who do interdisciplinary science; she brilliantly combines field- and lab-based research with method development and state-of-the-art analytical approaches, inspiring junior scientists and the ‘more experienced’ among us along the way.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director

*Press: MacArthur Foundation, LA Times, New York Times, and Washington Post

Greetings! Our annual call for research, fellowship, and education proposals is posted!  We continue to support research grants and graduate student and postdoctoral fellowships that will significantly advance C-DEBI’s central research agenda to investigate the subseafloor biosphere deep in marine sediment and oceanic crust, including on “expeditions of opportunity.” C-DEBI education & outreach grants will continue to fund the development of educational opportunities and materials that are pertinent to deep biosphere research in the subseafloor environment in support of our education and outreach goal to create distinctive, targeted education programs and promote increased public awareness about life below the seafloor. C-DEBI welcomes proposals from applicants who would enhance diversity in C-DEBI and STEM fields. Note, we have moved up the deadline for this call to December 1, 2016 to provide ample time for review by the anticipated notification date.

I look forward to continued, strong engagement by the community through our many C-DEBI programs and activities.

Cheers,

Jan Amend
C-DEBI Director