Victoria Orphan is a geobiologist studying the interactions between microorganisms in extreme environments including deep-sea methane seeps and vents. She currently holds the James Irvine Professorship of Environmental Science and Geobiology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech. Orphan received her Ph.D. in the Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology program at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2001, then served as a National Research Council fellow at the NASA Ames Research Center as before joining the Geobiology faculty at Caltech in 2004. Dr. Orphan is an advocate of multi-disciplinary science and her research program integrates molecular, microscopy, and geochemical techniques to study the ecophysiology and interactions between environmental microbes, with an emphasis on microorganisms involved in the cycling of methane and sulfur in anoxic ocean ecosystems. She helped to pioneer novel stable isotope applications using secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) for measuring the metabolic activity of bacterial and archaeal cells in environmental samples and has applied these techniques to develop new understanding into the beneficial microbial symbioses that serve as the primary sink for the greenhouse gas methane in the ocean.
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