Professor of Earth Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Environmental Studies
E-mail: dbottjer@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-6100
Office: ZHS 233
Associate Professor (Research) of Biological Sciences Emerita
Dr. Linda Duguay was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She spent her first 21 years in the Ocean State where she developed her life long interest in Ocean Sciences. She obtained her undergraduate education in Biology at the University of Rhode Island (URI) and completed her MS and Ph.D. research in Biological Oceanography at the Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (RSMAS) of the University of Miami (UM) on Virginia Key, Florida. Her research focused on life history traits, physiological adaptations, and factors regulating the population dynamics of sub-tropical marine organisms.
E-mail: duguay@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 821-1335
Office: CAS 200
Paxson H. Offield Professor Emeritus in Fisheries Ecology and Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences
Dennis Hedgecock received a B.S. in Biology from St. Mary’s College, California, in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Genetics, from the University of California, Davis, in 1974. Hedgecock joined the USC College as the first Paxson H. Offield Professor of Fisheries Ecology in 2003, following a nearly 30-year career at UC Davis. He is a past Head of the Marine Environmental Biology Section of the Department of Biological Sciences.
E-mail: dhedge@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 821-2091
Office: AHF 130
Adjunct Professor of Biological Sciences
Myrna Jacobson Meyers is a biogeochemist interested in adaptive physiology in marine systems. She studies sediment/rock/plant exoenzyme systems and nutrient biogeochemistry focusing on adaptations to environmental temperature and nutrient variation. She has worked in mangrove, deep sea, intertidal, and subtidal environments. She is currently working on the physiology of Giant Kelp Microbiome interactions as kelp age, in different environmental conditions in both laboratory and field settings. In addition, in conjunction with the John Hench School of Cinematic Arts, she produces animations describing fundamental biological principals, and teaches how to communicate science using learner centered learning techniques.
E-mail: myrnaj@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-5145
Office: AHF 139
Lewthwaite, Jayme
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
E-mail: jlewthwa@usc.edu
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Tony Michaels is a nationally recognized leader in sustainability and innovation across multiple business sectors and academic fields. He is the co-founder and CEO of EVEA Farm Management which creates vertically integrated supply chains for large food companies, primarily with organic row crops. He is co-founder and managing director of Proteus Environmental Technologies, a leader in the transition of technology innovations to scale. He is also a senior advisor to the CEO of AltaSea, a unique incubator for the Blue Economy in the Port of Los Angeles. Previously he was CEO of Midwestern BioAg, a leader in soil health and sustainable agriculture for nearly 40 years. Other leadership roles include Chief Scientist at the private equity firm Pegasus Capital Advisors, president of ReCommunity Energy, and CEO of PhycoSystems.
Tony maintains an active interest in the study and use of microbial-dominated ecosystems. This ranges from his current work in agriculture to a continued interest in how the ocean’s biological pump mediates the uptake of atmospheric CO2. His work is mostly at the interface between scholarship and business, where the science creates innovations that are important to the future of our planet and the companies provide a method for scaling these innovations so that they can actually implement change in our daily lives.
E-mail: tony.michaels.renew@gmail.com
Website: LinkedIn
Nuzhdin, Sergey
Professor of Biological Sciences and the Founder of AltaSea Algal Lab
With 27 years of PI expertise in UC Davis (Evolution and Ecology) and USC (Molecular and Computation, Marine and Environmental Biology), Nuzhdin published over 200 research manuscripts, and trained over 80 graduate and postdoctoral researchers including in biodiversity and restorative aquaculture. The primary expertise in quantitative and organismal biology, with recent focus on macroalgae and marine invertebrates.
Link to lab website
Link to personal faculty page
E-mail: snuzhdin@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-5773
Office: RRI 304C
Weissman, JL
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Primary affiliation: Department of Ecology & Evolution and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS), Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY
Jackie Lee “JL” Weissman (they/she) is an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University starting Fall 2024. Her research examines how microbes survive and thrive across diverse environments. She develops new tools to infer what microbes are doing and can do from DNA sequences captured directly from the environment (“metagenomes”), aiming to improve the representation of microbially-mediated biogeochemical cycles in global climate models. She also has a special interest in using a combination of comparative genomics, population genetics, and mathematical models to understand the ancient and ongoing battle between microbes and their viruses. She believes all students, with supportive training and mentorship, can become highly-capable computational biologists, and loves to show students how a little coding can go a long way.
Previously, JL served as the inaugural Director for Proposal Development at the City College of New York, where they managed large, interdisciplinary efforts to bring center-level funding to the college and trained early-career researchers in grantmaking. They maintain research affiliations in biology at CCNY and the University of Southern California and have taught at The Cooper Union School of Art. Before returning to New York, they were faculty at Chapman University, where they ran a computational biology research lab, taught, and developed initiatives to improve mentorship at the college level.
Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) of Biological Sciences
Understanding evolution is fundamental to deciphering the complexity of our living world and its enormous biological diversity. Wetzer is interested in evolutionary questions about invertebrates and uses phylogenetic inference to investigate broad evolutionary patterns at a macroevolutionary scale. Her specialty is Crustacea with a focus on marine isopods (pill bugs).
E-mail: rwetzer@nhm.org
Phone: (213) 763-3217
Office: AHF 107A
Zakem, Emily
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences
Primary affiliation: Staff Associate | Principal Investigator, Biosphere Sciences & Engineering (Pasadena, CA), Carnegie Science
I am a theoretical and computational biogeochemist and microbial ecologist. I am a Staff Associate/Principal Investigator at Carnegie Science in Biosphere Sciences & Engineering (BSE). I currently work from two of Carnegie’s campuses: at Stanford University (Stanford, CA) and at Caltech (Pasadena, CA). I am also an Assistant Professor (by courtesy) at Stanford and an Adjunct Assistant Professor (Research) at the University of Southern California. Prior to Carnegie, I was a Simons Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Marine Microbial Ecology, working at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles with Dr. Naomi Levine. I completed my PhD in Climate Physics and Chemistry in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), advised by Dr. Mick Follows. In my research, I aim to understand the relationships between microbial activity, global biogeochemistry, and the climate system. I use theory and mathematical models to understand how microbial ecology drives carbon, nitrogen, and other elemental cycling. I aim to develop broadly applicable models of microbial populations, grounded in underlying chemical and physical constraints, in order to robustly understand and predict the biogeochemical cycling in diverse and changing environments.
Link to lab website
Link to personal website
E-mail:ezakem@carnegiescience.edu
