Seminar Series - Dr. Jackie Goordial

On Thursday, November 7 we are hosting Dr. Jackie Goordial for the IB Seminar (https://www.envmicrobio.uoguelph.ca/). Jackie is an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph in the School of Environmental Sciences. She is investigating how communities of microorganisms interact to maintain diversity and mediate biogeochemical cycling in the environment, linking microscale processes to global scale biogeochemical cycling. To carry out her research, she routinely employs a combination of genomic sequencing with culturing, microbial metabolic activity and viability measurements both in situ and in the laboratory. While less than 1% of known microorganisms can be cultivated in the lab and are known to us solely through molecular analyses, this approach results in a more holistic understanding of environmental microbiology than genomic analyses alone. Broadly, she seeks to understand the abiotic controls on microbial activity, growth, dormancy and death and how these physiological cell states relate to diversity, evolution and biogeochemical cycling in the environment, on Earth and potentially beyond our planet in a field known as Astrobiology.