Jacob Winnikoff is a postdoctoral scholar in the Girguis Lab at Harvard University. He studies the effects of pressure, temperature, and other stressors on diverse deep-sea life, with a special focus on the fatty (lipid) membrane that surrounds all cells. As a member of the November 2025 SPARC expedition off of Uruguay, Jacob will profile the membrane components of seafloor archaea to understand how these microbes deal with chemical gradients and to see what their membranes have in common with our own. During the August 2023 cruise to the Western Galápagos Rift, he studied microbial strategies for survival in the dramatic temperature gradients within hydrothermal chimney walls. Jacob earned a B.S. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Stanford University in 2016 and began studying the deep sea as a Graduate Research Associate at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). He earned a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UC Santa Cruz and joined the Girguis Lab as a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow in 2022.
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