Rachel Harris is a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Girguis’ deep-sea biology and engineering lab at Harvard University. She received her A.B. in Biological Sciences and Russian from Wellesley College in 2014, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Geosciences at Princeton in 2017 and 2020, respectively, under the late Tullis Onstott. Rachel’s research explores the habitable limits of microbial life through the lens of Subsurface Lithoautotrophic Microbial Ecosystems (SLiMEs), with particular interest in methane biogeochemistry of astrobiological targets of interest (e.g., Mars and icy moons) and the ecophysiology of archaea involved in anaerobic methane cycling. On the R/V Falkor(Too) cruise to the Western Galapagos Rift, Rachel will be deploying high-pressure recovery vessels and implementing stable isotope tracer experiments to characterize the effects of depressurization on rates of microbial anaerobic methane oxidation. She will also participate in a hydrothermal plume transect, coupling in situ mass spectrometry and RNA preservation of aerobic methanotrophic bacteria to constrain methane loss in a vent field.
Cruises:
