{"id":3687,"date":"2025-02-27T21:52:39","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T21:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/wrigley\/?p=3687"},"modified":"2026-04-02T22:51:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T22:51:53","slug":"biogeochemist-karen-lloyd-studies-deep-ocean-microbes-joins-wrigley-institute-usc-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/wrigley\/2025\/02\/27\/biogeochemist-karen-lloyd-studies-deep-ocean-microbes-joins-wrigley-institute-usc-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Biogeochemist Karen Lloyd joins USC faculty as Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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\n\n \n Biogeochemist Karen Lloyd on a research trip to Chile, where she traveled to study microbes that live in hot springs. (Photo: Karen Lloyd)\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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Biogeochemist Karen Lloyd joins USC faculty as Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n \n February 27, 2025<\/span>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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By Kathryn Royster<\/em><\/p>\n

Karen Lloyd<\/a>, a renowned biogeochemist known for her work on microbes that live deep beneath the Earth\u2019s surface, has joined the USC faculty as the Wrigley Chair in Environmental Studies and professor of Earth sciences.<\/span><\/p>\n

“I am thrilled to welcome Karen to USC as part of the Wrigley Institute community and the university\u2019s world-class team of environmental and sustainability scholars,” says Wrigley Institute Director Joe \u00c1rvai. “She is the rare researcher who does groundbreaking work that addresses real-world needs while also communicating about it in a way that is both entertaining and insightful. The Wrigley Institute, and our extended community, are lucky to have her.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lloyd\u2019s research focuses on microbes that live in environments such as the bottom of the ocean, hot springs<\/a>, or under Arctic permafrost. Some of these microbes have extremely slow metabolisms\u2013so slow that they can go thousands of years<\/a> without reproducing, experiencing molecular turnover, or eating. Lloyd seeks to understand why the organisms are in this state, whether their slow metabolisms are an evolutionary advantage, what kinds of conditions might cause them to \u201cwake up,\u201d and how their presence and activities might intersect with climate change.<\/span><\/p>\n

To uncover the answers to these questions, Lloyd focuses heavily on a field-first approach to research. This approach comes partly by necessity: the microbes she studies reproduce so slowly that she could literally spend the rest of her life waiting for a culture to grow in a Petri dish. But she also prefers fieldwork for its true-to-life conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Lloyd and another researcher collecting data at a hot spring in Chile. Lloyd studies slow-growing microbes that live for thousands, possibly even millions, of years in extreme environments such as hot springs, the Arctic permafrost, and the deep ocean. She prefers to study these microbes in the field as much as possible, to get an accurate understanding of how their physical environment and climate change affect them. (Photo: Jacopo Pasotti)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cYou can do all the theoretical lab work you want, but when you\u2019re in the wild with so many factors affecting the organism, it may perform differently. That\u2019s why I always measure things in the wild as much as possible,\u201d Lloyd says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her preference for getting out into the field runs deep. Growing up on the rural North Carolina coast, Lloyd spent many hours exploring the environment around her home. She was particularly fond of the ocean\u2013so fond of it, in fact, that at age 13, she literally knocked on the door of the Duke University Marine Lab and asked if she could assist the researchers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI went to college with the aim of majoring in biology and just got sucked up by chemistry,\u201d Lloyd says. \u201cIt was like solving puzzles. But I couldn\u2019t imagine spending the rest of my life only in a lab, so I decided to study oceanography as well.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now that Lloyd has arrived in Los Angeles, the destination seems almost inevitable. She first encountered the Wrigley Institute and USC as a Ph.D. student, when she attended a summer course taught by faculty affiliate Will Berelson at the Wrigley Marine Science Center. That experience touched off a long-term connection with USC, even as she went on to a postdoctoral fellowship in Denmark and joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the years, she collaborated numerous times with the late Jan Amend<\/a>, who was a microbiologist and USC Dornsife divisional dean of life sciences. Many of her other co-researchers have been USC graduate students or alumni. She says that USC\u2019s unique strengths in marine microbiology, geobiology, Earth sciences, and engineering were a strong draw for her. Add the wealth of local opportunities for collaboration\u2013with JPL, Caltech, UCLA, Cal State, and the Natural History Museum of L.A., to name a few\u2013and it was an easy \u201cyes\u201d to make the cross-country move from Knoxville to L.A.<\/span><\/p>\n

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VIDEO: How Karen Lloyd Finds Life in the Earth’s Deepest, Darkest Places<\/h3>\n