Welcome, Karen Lloyd!
Karen G. Lloyd is a microbial biogeochemist, focused on discovering and describing life inside Earth’s crust. She joined the Earth Sciences faculty in July 2024 as the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and Professor of Earth Sciences. She has a joint appointment as Professor of Marine and Environmental Biology.
Lloyd comes to us after twelve years at the University of Tennessee, where she was Professor of Microbiology, preceded by a post-doc with Bo Barker Jørgensen at the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University in Denmark and a PhD with Andreas Teske in Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina.
Lloyd and her lab determine the carbon and energy sources for the vast uncharacterized majority of subsurface microorganisms in hydrothermal vents/springs, cold methane seeps, deep oceanic sediments, coastal estuaries and bays, and subduction zones. Her research combines bioinformatics (e.g., phylogenetics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, and metabolomics) with geochemical measurements to recreate the lives of deep subsurface microbial communities and determine the effects they are having on Earth’s biogeochemical cycles.
Karen’s TED talks:
https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_lloyd_this_deep_sea_mystery_is_changing_our_understanding_of_life?subtitle=en