DCO Scientific Steering Committees

Dr. James Badro, research director at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and scientific collaborator at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, is expanding what is known about Deep Earth geophysics and geochemistry through high pressure experiments and first principles calculations. His research interests combine experimental petrology, geochemistry, and experimental and computational mineral physics to understand mantle and core composition, structure and dynamics, and Earth’s formation and evolution. Professor Badro is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a life fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America.

Dr. Roberto Bini’s research activities are primarily experimental in nature, where he uses linear and non-linear optical techniques to better understand the structural and dynamic properties of molecular systems in condensed phases. An Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Universita di Firenze, he has more than 100 articles addressing chemical-physics and condensed matter physics arguments.  His work has been recognized with the following awards: the San Valentino d’Oro XXXI for the scientific Research, “Le Scienze” magazine prize for Chemistry, and Medaglia del Presidente della Repubblica.

Dr. Leonid Dubrovinsky is a professor at Bayreuth University, where his research focuses on phase transformations and chemical reactions at ultra-high pressures and ultra-high pressure and temperature crystallography. Dubrovinsky has served on the editorial board of High Pressure Research since 2006.  He is a recipient of the European Mineralogical Union Medal, the Bergstedt prize (Sweden) by the Royal Society of Sciences, and most recently, the 2017 Gregori Amonoff Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2017 for his contributions in the field of crystallography.

Dr. Giulia Galli is the Liew Family professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She also holds a senior scientist position at the Argonne National Laboratory and is a senior fellow of the University of Chicago’s ANL Computational Institute. Galli is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the recipient of an award of excellence from the Department of Energy and of the Science and Technology Award from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her research is focused on the development and use of theoretical and computational tools to understand and predict the properties and behavior of materials (solids, liquids and nanostructures) from first principles.

Dr. Mark Ghiorso is the vice president and senior research associate at OFM Research Inc. Ghiorso also serves as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and adjoint professor at Vanderbilt University. He also serves as an associate editor for the American Journal of Science and Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology. Ghiorso is a fellow, councilor, and distinguished lecturer of the Mineralogical Society of America, a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union. His work has been recognized with honors from the Mineralogical Society of America, European Geosciences Union, and the American Geophysical Union.

Dr. Dennis Klug is a principal research scientist at the National Research Council of Canada. He maintains a mixture of theory and experiment in his research and his main current interests are in the areas of predictions and characterization of structures and properties of materials using tools varying from first-principles quantum methods to synchrotron radiation and neutron scattering techniques. He has authored approximately 250 publications including in Physical Review Letters, Nature, Science, and Nature Materials, with the majority of publications on matter under extreme conditions. He has been recognized as an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Physical Review Applied.

Dr. Konstantin Litasov is the head of the Laboratory of Experimental Geochemistry and Petrology of Earth’s Mantle in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Novosibirsk State University. His research interests are many, ranging from abiogenic carbon to carbon and carbonates at high pressure to thermodynamics and mineral physics. He also is a senior staff scientist at the Laboratory of Ultra High-pressure Research and Laboratory of High Pressure Minerals and Diamond Deposits at V.S. Sobolev Institute of Geology and Mineralogy.  Litasov serves as a member of the Reservoirs and Flux Community, as well.

Dr. Craig Manning is a professor of Geology and Geochemistry in Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, and serves as department vice-chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include water chemistry, thermodynamics, gas chemistry, geochemistry, igneous petrology, and metamorphic petrology. Manning is a fellow and past counselor of the Mineralogical Society of America. He serves on the advisory board ofGeochemistry, Geophysics, and Geosystems, and is associate editor of theAmerican Journal of Science. Manning chairs DCO’s Executive Committee and the Extreme Physics and Chemistry community. He also is a member of the Reservoirs and Fluxes community, as well as Synthesis Group 2019.

Dr. Wendy Mao is an associate professor of geological sciences and, by courtesy, of geophysics at Stanford University. Mao studies the behavior of materials under compression, which often leads to the discovery of novel phases and new phenomena. Mao was a COMPRES distinguished lecturer, the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Mineralogical Society of America Award, and the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award from the Advanced Photon Source. Mao serves as co-Chair of the Extreme Physics and Chemistry Community. 

Dr. Carmen Sanchez-Valle is a professor of mineralogy at the University of Munster. Her research ranges from fluid-rock interactions and mass transfer in subduction zones, to the physics of melts and magmatic processes, to water in the Earth’s interior and the fate of subducted slabs. She serves as specialty chief editor for Frontiers in Earth Science and Earth and Planetary Materials, and has served as a guest editor forChemical Geology. Sanchez-Valle was a participant on the review panel for PRC3 (Matter and material properties) at Synchrotron Soleil, France, and the XAS review panel at Synchrotron Swiss Light Source, Switzerland.

Dr. Dimitri Sverjensky is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 1984.  A geochemist, his research interests are diverse and include: deep Earth carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and water cycles, astrobiology, high temperature/pressure aqueous solution chemistry, and chemical equilibria and mass transfer.  He is a fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry, and a recipient of the Lindgren Award from the Society of Economic Geologists.  Sverjensky is co-PI of the synthesis project MELTS and DEW.

Dr. Patrick Allard is a volcanologist at the Institut de Physics du Globe de Paris, where he also serves as director of research for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Allard’s research focuses on remote sensing, petrology, volcanic hazards, and volcanology. An expert in his field, he has published more than 150 peer-reviewed publications on these topics.

Dr. Sonja Aulbach is a research associate at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on experimental high-pressure petrology and geochemistry, including major, minor, and trace elements all the way to diamonds. She is often sought out as a keynote speaker and has spoken at the second European Mineralogical Conference in Italy, the International Conference on Craton Formation and Destruction in China, and the 18th V. M. Goldschmidt Conference in Canada.  She serves as a frequent reviewer of Geology. Aulbach also is a research partner in DCO’s Diamonds and Mantle Geodynamics of Carbon initiative.

Dr. Elizabeth Cottrell is the curator-in-charge of National Rock and Ore Collections at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Prior to that, she was director of the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program. Her research focuses on understanding the long-term evolution of the planet, from the mechanism and chemical signature of planetary core formation 4.5 billion years ago, to the surface expression of Earth’s interior today at volcanoes around the globe. Cottrell is a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, a panelist for the National Science Foundation, a distinguished lecturer for the National Science Foundation’s Geodynamics at Rifting and Subducting Margins (GeoPrisms) program, and a member of DCO’s Task Force 2020.

Dr. Marie Edmonds, a reader in Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, is responsible for overall scientific and intellectual oversight of DCO's synthesis and integration activities. She is a mid-career researcher who has built a successful group focused on understanding volatile cycling in the solid Earth. She has a number of leadership roles within the Natural Environment Research Council (the United Kingdom’s primary funding agency) and the Geological Society of London. In addition to serving on DCO’s Executive Committee, Edmonds chairs DCO’s Synthesis Group 2019 and has served as co-chair of the Reservoirs and Fluxes community since November 2014.

Dr. Tobias Fischer is a professor of volcanology and director of the Fluids and Volatiles Laboratory at the University of New Mexico. He also chairs the Board of Directors of DCO’s Carbon Observatory Deep Carbon Degassing (DCO-DECADE) international initiative that brings together scientists from about 11 countries to better understand degassing of carbon from active volcanoes and volcanic regions. His research focuses on volcanology with emphasis on active volcanism. He currently conducts research at volcanoes in Central America, the Aleutians, the East African Rift, and Antarctica. Fischer also serves on DCO’s Engagement Advisory Committee.

Dr. Evelyn Füri is a research fellow at the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques, which is part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Her research interests include cosmochemistry and isotope geochemistry of volatile elements, analysis of rare gases in cometary matter, and analysis of volatiles in lunar samples (Apollo, Luna 24) and in particles of the Itokawa asteroid (Hayabusa).  She also is a member of the European Space Agency’s Prospect User Group for the Russian Luna-27 mission. 

Dr. Fabrice Gaillard is a planetary scientist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’s Orleans Campus. Gaillard is an experimentalist, specializing in high-pressure high-temperature methods, with consolidated background in chemical thermodynamics. His research activities include volatile species and magmatic systems on Earth and elsewhere.

Dr. Marc Hirschmann is the George and Orpha Gibson chair of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Minnesota, where he is also a professor of geology and geophysics. He uses high-pressure experimentation, together with analytical and theoretical tools, to improve understanding of melting, mass transfer, and differentiation in planetary interiors. He is taking advantage of new devices and instrumentation that are allowing measurements that were previously intractable. Hirschmann is a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America.   

Dr. Hans Keppler is a professor and director of the Bayerisches Geoinstitut at the University of Bayeuth. Keppler’s research interests include liquids and silicate melts, the internal water cycle of Earth, trace elements in magmatic hydrothermal systems, and volcanic eruptions and transport processes in subduction zones. Keppler is a fellow of the Geochemical Society, the European Association of Geochemistry, and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the Mineralogical Society of America, and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He was presented the Bowen Award by AGU. Keppler is on the editorial board of Elements and Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology.

Dr. Kerstin Lehnert is the Doherty Senior Research Scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Lehnert’s fields of interest are geoinformatics, scientific data management, igneous petrology, and geochemistry. She is actively involved in a number of projects that strive to make data accessible including EarthChem, Geoinformatics for Geochemistry, and Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance.  The Geochemical Society recognized her work with a Distinguished Service Award.

Dr. Bernard Marty is a professor at the Université de Lorraine where he teaches geochemistry, geochronology, and cosmochemistry. He has published 200 peer-reviewed articles on his research, which spans the origin of isotopic variations in the solar system, geochemistry of volatile elements, early Earth geodynamics and environments, mantle geodynamics, and fluid circulations in the crust. Marty is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the European Association of Geochemistry, the Geochemical Society, and the Meteoritical Society. He is a recipient of the Dolomieu Grand Prix from the French Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Graham Pearson is a mantle geochemist whose research interests focus on the origin and evolution of the continental lithospheric mantle and its diamond cargo. His current region of interest is Arctic Canada and its diamond-bearing roots. Pearson is a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta. In hopes of sharing diamond knowledge,he helped organize DCO’s third International Diamond School and is an active member of the Reservoir and Fluxes’ Diamonds and Mantle Geodynamics of Carbon Consortium.

Dr. Steven Shirey is a senior staff scientist of the Carnegie Institution for Science where he is a member of the four-person Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry Group of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Independently and with his mentoring of PhD students, and postdoctoral fellows, Dr. Shirey researches geological processes pertaining to the igneous evolution of the solid Earth. The formation of diamonds has been an area of interest and research for Dr. Shirey for nearly two decades. He is noted for the study of mineral inclusions in diamonds which has been applied to global scale questions such as the age of diamond-forming events, the creation of the continents, the onset of plate tectonics, and the recycling of surface materials into the deeper parts of the mantle. Dr. Shirey is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the Geochemical Society, and the Mineralogical Society of America where he served as its president. In addition to his work on lithospheric and superdeep diamonds, he has published widely on topics as diverse as arc volcanism, Archean crustal evolution, continental volcanism, meteorites and impacts, mantle heterogeneity, and isotope geochemistry method development. As of the end of 2018, his publications had earned a Google Scholar H-index of 60 with more than 13,000 citations.

Pr. Magali Ader is a professor at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and serves on the Engagement Advisory Committee for DCO’s Deep Energy community. Her research sits at the intersection of Earth and life sciences, in the burgeoning field of geobiology. Using measurements of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions of ancient sedimentary rocks, compared to those of analogous modern geobiological systems, she is contributing to our understanding of how Earth and life interacted through time on both a local and a global scale. Ader also serves as the international secretary of the Geochemical Society.

Dr. Chris Ballentine is chair of the Geochemistry Department at the University of Oxford. He has spent his scientific career developing and applying the noble gas isotope tool to different Earth systems. His research interests encompass understanding how the Earth gained its gaseous inventory and the processes controlling terrestrial reservoir interaction and evolution over time. Ballentine has been involved in organizing and building the governance and structure of the European Goldschmidt conferences since 2007; chairing Davos 2009, serving as the Goldschmidt officer for Prague 2011, and as co-convenor of Florence 2013.  He also has served as president of the European Association of Geochemistry in 2013-2014. 

Dr. Peter Clift shares his knowledge of the marine geology of Asia with students from around the world. He is the Charles T. McCord Professor of petroleum geology at Louisiana State University, the Hongguo Fellowship Professor at Nanjing Normal University, a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China. His principal research interests focus on Asia and range from the geological aspects of the petroleum systems of South and Eastern Asia, to climatic and anthropogenic impacts on the environment in monsoonal Asia, to solid Earth-climate interactions. He also actively conducts research on active margins and the origin of the continental crust, with particular interest in mass balancing the carbon and solid rock flux through the global subduction system. 

Dr. David Cole is a professor and Ohio Research Scholar in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University. A geochemist, his research interests span a number of sub-disciplines in the geosciences and chemistry, and include both low temperature and high temperature studies relevant to energy systems. He is the OSU Interim Director of the Subsurface Energy Resource Center, Director of the OSU Subsurface Energy Materials Characterization and Analysis Laboratory. Cole serves on DCO's Synthesis Group 2019 and served previously as chair of the Deep Energy Community.

Prof. Isabelle Daniel’s research interests focus on geobiology and minerals/rocks under extreme conditions. In her work, she employs advanced in situ experimental and analytical methods such as Raman spectroscopy and synchrotron X-ray diffraction. She investigates serpentinization and serpentine minerals, fluid-rock interactions at high pressure and microorganisms under extreme conditions. Daniel is a faculty member in Earth Sciences at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon1 in France, where she is also affiliated with the Laboratoire de Geologie de Lyon and chairs the Observatoire de Lyon. Because of the depth and breadth of her research, Daniel serves as chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for the Deep Energy Community and as a member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the Deep Life Community. She is also active in the DCO’s Extreme Physics and Chemistry Community.

Dr. Pablo García del Real's research broadly focuses on carbonate mineralization, serpentinization, and seafloor seepage. García del Real received his Ph.D. in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University in 2016. From 2016 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Université Lyon 1, working in the lab of DCO Executive Committee member and Deep Energy Community Chair Dr. Isabelle Daniel. García del Real is currently a Project Geoscientist at Fugro's Seeps--Centre of Excellence where he studies the geophysical and geochemical signatures of marine seepage worldwide.

Dr. Nils Holm is Professor Emeritus of marine geochemistry of the Stockholm University. Holm is interested in organic compounds in marine hydrothermal environments and their importance for the carbon cycle and the formation of early life on Earth and other terrestrial plants. He also works on questions related to the deep subsurface biosphere and its potential existence in an astrobiological context.

Dr. Long Li is an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the University of Alberta. Li is a stable isotope geochemist working on carbon and nitrogen cycles at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, with particular interest in carbon and nitrogen behaviors during fluid-rock interaction, subduction-zone metamorphism, and volcanism from modern to deep time on Earth.

Dr. Tullis Onstott is a professor of geosciences at Princeton University. For 23 years, he has focused his research on subsurface microbial life. His research involves exploration of subsurface microbial ecosystems via mines, drilling, and new underground laboratories, and quantifying their community structure, function, and activity. His group analyzes metagenomes, metatranscriptomes and metaproteomes, performs stable isotope measurements, and combines geochemical measurements with thermodynamic models. In 2007,Time Magazine named Onstott one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The U.S. Department of Energy also recognized his excellent research with awards on three occasions.

Dr. Magali Pujol is a reservoir engineer with TOTAL at the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine.  A geochemist, Pujol's research encompasses isotope geochemistry, including stable isotope analysis, geochronology, and noble gases. 

Dr. Igor Tolstikhin has spent his career answering the question “How does nature work?” using isotopic compositions of the elements in natural materials. His current research activity includes noble gas mass-spectrometry, isotope cosmo-geochemistry, isotope hydrology, and modeling of the Earth’s chemical evolution. Tolstikhin is affiliated with Institutes of Russian Academy of Science, the Geological Institute of Kola Science Center, Apatity, and the Space Research Institute, Moscow. In 2013 the European Association of Geochemistry recognized Tolstikhin’s many contributions to deciphering how nature works with the presentation of its Urey Award.

Dr. Edward Young is a professor of geology at UCLA and co-Chair of the Deep Energy Community. His research spans geochemistry and cosmochemistry. He envisioned and oversaw the development of the Panorama High-Resolution Mass Spectrometer, which is capable of unprecedented measurements of isotopic bonder ordering in methane gas, making it possible to accurately define the origin and provenance of various sources of methane. He also is principal investigator on a study that is advancing understanding of the extent to which isotopologues can differentiate between biotic and abiotic carbon compounds. The Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry formally recognized Young’s contributions to geochemistry by naming him fellow. He also is a fellow of the Meteoritical Society.

Dr. Doug Bartlett is a professor of marine microbial genetics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. He has extensive experience in analyses of extremophilic microbial life in the inner space of our oceans. His research group has pioneered studies of the adaptations that enable deep-sea microbes to live at great pressures, up to and beyond 15,000 pounds per square inch. Much of this work utilizes the tools of genetics, genomics, and functional genomics to work through the gene parts lists and wiring diagrams associated with particular aspects of microbial adaptation. Bartlett is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Dr. Rick Colwell is a professor in ocean ecology and biogeochemistry at Oregon State University, and an adjunct and affiliate faculty member at Idaho State University. Colwell is an expert in microbial ecology, investigating subsurface microbiology, geomicrobiology, and coupling of microbial rates and processes to physical and chemical parameters in the environment. Colwell has served as president of the International Society for Subsurface Microbiology since 2008. He is a reviewer for Applied and Environmental Microbiologyand a member of the editorial board of Biodegradation. Colwell is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, International Society for Subsurface Microbiology, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Dr. Steven D’Hondt is a professor of oceanography at the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. He studies life in marine sediment, deep beneath the seafloor, which is one of the very few ecosystems not yet pervasively altered by humans. He investigates the diversity, activities, and evolution of life in this remote microbial ecosystem, and explores the fundamental limits to life on Earth. As part of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI) and DCO, D’Hondt collaborates with scientists from around the world to advance understanding of subsurface life.

Dr. Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, co-Chair of the Deep Life Community, is a biogeochemist and organic geochemist best known for his research of microbial life below the ocean bed - the deep biosphere, methane biogeochemistry, and microbial lipid biomarkers. Hinrichs is a professor at the University of Bremen, and heads the Organic Chemistry Group at the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and is co-leader of MARUM's Research Unit, Geosphere-Biosphere Interactions. He was co-chief scientist of Expedition 337 of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program onboard the drilling vessel Chikyū, which set the current world record for the deepest microbial life ever detected, at nearly 2.5 km below the seafloor. Hinrichs is a recipient of two Advanced Grants from the European Research Council and has been a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science since 2011.

Dr. Fumio Inagaki is a geomicrobiologist, who has sailed in scientific ocean drilling expeditions many times as a shipboard scientist (ODP Leg 201, IODP Expeditions 301 and 316) and as co-chief scientist (Expeditions 329, 337, and 370). He was awarded the first Taira Prize by the American Geophysical Union in recognition of his significant contributions to the deep-biosphere frontier research. Among his contributions were the discovery of the occurrence of deep subseafloor microbial communities, in coal-bearing sediments down to ~2.5 km below the ocean floor, which have played important ecological roles in biogeochemical carbon cycling over geologic time. Inagaki is deputy director of JAMSTEC’s R&D Center for Ocean Drilling Science and the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research, and also heads the Geomicrobiology Group and Geobiotechnology Group, JAMSTEC.  

Dr. Thomas Kieft is a professor of biology at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Kieft’s research interests span microbiology of subsurface terrestrial environments, soil and groundwater, and extreme environments microbiology, and the physiology and ecology of water-stressed microbes. His current research projects focus on biomarkers in extreme environments, South African ultra-deep mines, and animal-microbe interactions.  

Dr. Mark Lever is a professor of environmental microbiology in the Department of Environmental Systems Science in the Institute of Biogeochemical and Pollutant Dynamics at ETH Zurich. His research interests include geomicrobiology, microbial ecology, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem ecology of aquatic sediments and Earth's crust with a focus on the carbon cycle. In addition to teaching and research, Lever serves as an associate editor for Frontiers in Extreme Microbiology, and as a review editor. He is a member of the Deep Life Community and serves on Synthesis Group 2019. 

Dr. Beth Orcutt is a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. She is a marine microbial biogeochemist who explores life below the seafloor in sediments and the oceanic crust. Orcutt's research focuses on understanding how microbes thrive in these deep-sea environments, and how their life impacts the cycling of elements on Earth. She is interested in which microbes can live on basalts and sulfides at the seafloor, and which geochemical processes occur on the rock surfaces. She is a member of the Deep Life Community and Task Force 2020.

Dr. Matt Schrenk is an assistant professor in geomicrobiology at Michigan State University. He investigates the diversity, distribution, and activities of microorganisms in the deep subsurface biosphere using molecular biological approaches coupled with geochemical analyses. His focus is on high pH microbial ecosystems created by the serpentinization of ultramafic rocks from the deep Earth. Schrenk also studies high temperature microbial ecosystems associated with volcanically driven hydrothermal venting in the oceans.

Dr. Mitchell Sogin is the distinguished senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory and co-Chair of the Deep Life Community. Sogin investigates the diversity and evolution of single-cell organisms. His molecular phylogeny produced the reference framework for understanding the evolution of microbial eukaryotes. He documented early diverging eukaryotic lineages, provided the first evidence of a specific link between animals and fungi to the exclusion of all other eukaryotes, demonstrated that the AIDS pathogen Pneumocystis shares a recent common evolutionary history with fungi instead of with parasitic protozoa that cause malaria, and he discovered the “rare biosphere” which accounts for most of the microbial diversity on Earth. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Fengping Wang is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Wang’s work focuses on the subsurface biosphere, specifically microbial diversity and geochemical processes, environmental adaptation mechanisms of extremophiles, and metabolic processes and pathways of extremophiles. She was awarded the Outstanding Young Scientist grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China for Deep Biosphere research. She also serves as a scientific committee member of IODP-China since 2014.

Dr. Roland Winter has been a professor at TU Dortmund University since 1997, and currently serves as dean of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Winter’s research interests include the structure, dynamics, energetics, phase behavior, and function of biomolecular systems. He also studies astrobiophysical chemistry and the structural and dynamic properties of complex liquids. Winter is an executive board member and head of the Research Area "Connecting Solvation Dynamics with Biomolecular Function" of the German Center of Excellence RESOLV ("Ruhr Explores Solvation"), and a recipient of the Dozenten-Price of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie.  He serves on a number of editorial boards including Biophysical Chemistry, J. Non-Equilib. Thermodyn, Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie - International Journal of Research in Physical Chemistry - and Chemie in unserer Zeit.