Meet the Microbiologist

In this podcast I talk to James Liao , a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. I spoke to Dr. Liao about his research into engineering microbes to make fuel. Today, we get most of the fuel for our cars out of the ground. It's a process fraught with dangerous consequences, from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the rise in global temperatures thanks to g...

To mark the celebration of Microbeworld's 50th episode of the Meet the Scientist podcast, we created a time lapse video that shows exactly what it takes to produce a single episode of the show. We hope you enjoy this behind the scenes look and we thank you for listening week after week. Cheers, to another 50 episodes!

In this podcast, I talk to R. Ford Denison of the University of Minnesota. Denison is an evolutionary biologist who's interested in how to make agriculture better. The ways in which plants thrive or fail are shaped by their evolutionary history, as well as the evolution that unfolds every planting season. We're most familiar with the evolution of resistance to pesticides in insects and to herbicid...

In this podcast, I talk with Irwin Sherman, professor emeritus at the University of California at Riverside, about the century-long quest for a vaccine against malaria. Scientists have been trying to make a vaccine for the disease almost since the discovery of the parasite that causes malaria. Yet decade after decade, they've encountered setbacks and failures. We talked about why it's so hard to m...

In this podcast I talk to  Keith Klugman , William H. Foege Chair of Global Health at Emory University. Dr. Klugman studies the disease that is the number one killer of children worldwide. If you guessed malaria or AIDS, you’d be wrong. It’s pneumonia. Two million children under five die every year from it every year--one child every 15 seconds.   Dr. Klugman and I spoke about his research on how...

Dr. Peter Daszak is a disease ecologist and President of the Wildlife Trust , an international organization of scientists dedicated to the conservation of biodiversity. He is a leader in the field of conservation medicine and is well known for uncovering the wildlife origin of the SARS virus. Dr. Daszak also identifed the first case of a species extinction caused by a disease and has demonstrated...

In this podcast I talk to Curtis Suttle, a professor and associate dean at the University of British Columbia. Suttle studies the diversity and population of viruses across the entire planet. He has helped show that viruses are by far the most common life forms on the planet. They also contain most of the genetic diversity of life, and they even control how much oxygen we have to breathe. I talked...

In this podcast, I talk to James Collins , an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at Boston University. Ten years ago Collins helped launch a new kind of science called synthetic biology. I talked to Collins about the achievements of synthetic biology over the past decade, such as engineering E. coli that can count, and about the future of synthetic biology--from us...

In this episode, I talk to Michael Worobey , an associate professor at the University of Arizona. Worobey is virus detective, gathering clues about how some of the world's deadliest pathogens have emerged and spread across the globe. Worobey and I talked about the harrowing journeys he has made in search of the origin of HIV, as well as the round-the-clock data-processing he and his colleagues use...

In this episode, I speak to Rob Knight , an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Knight studies our inner ecology: the 100 trillion microbes that grow in and on our bodies. Knight explained how hundreds of species can coexist on the palm of your hand, how bacteria manipulate your immune system and maybe even your brain, and how...

In this episode I speak to Julian Davies , professor emeritus in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Davies is one of the world's experts on antibiotics. I talked to Davies about how the discovery of antibiotics changed the course of modern medicine, and how we now face a growing threat from the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We also...

In this episode I speak to Sallie "Penny" Chisholm , the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT. Dr. Chisholm studies photosynthesis—the way life harnesses the energy of the sun. Plants carry out photosynthesis, but so do microbes in the ocean. Dr. Chisholm studies the most abundant of these photosynthetic microbes, a species of bacteria called Prochlorococcus.  There a...

John Wooley is Associate Vice Chancellor of Research and Professor of Chemistry-Biochemistry and of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego. Wooley is a leader in the young field of metagenomics: the science of gathering vast numbers of genes from the oceans, soils, air, and the human body. A generation ago biologist knew the sequences of a few thousand genes. Since then that figure...

In this episode I talk with Paul Turner , an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University. 2009 saw the emergence of a new strain of H1N1 flu. Scientists soon determined that the virus had leaped from pigs to humans and then spread to millions of people. When viruses make this kind of leap it's a reason to worry. In 1918 when a strain of flu leapt from birds to humans...

Jonathan Eisen is a professor at the  University of California, Davis Genome Center . Over the course of his career, he has pioneered new ways of sequencing microbial genomes and analyzing them. I talked to Eisen about some of the weirdest creatures he's studied, such as bacteria that only live on the bellies of worms at the bottom of the ocean, and how we may be able to exploit their genomes for...

Hazel Barton is the Ashland Professor of Integrative Science at Northern Kentucky. She explores some of the world's most remote caves to study the remarkable diversity of microbes that thrive in their dark rececesses. I spoke to Barton about how she first became captivated by these bizarre organisms, what it's like to do delicate microbiology when you're hip-deep in mud, and why she wants to explo...

Dennis Bray is an active professor emeritus in both the Department of Physiology and Department of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He studies the behavior of microbes--how they "decide" where to swim, when to divide, and how best to manage the millions of chemical reactions taking place inside their membranes. For Bray, microbes are tiny, living computers, with genes and proteins serv...

Michael Cunliffe is a microbiologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Warwick in England. He studies the microbes that live in the thin layer of water at the very surface of the ocean. His research is shedding light on an ecosystem that's both mysterious and huge, spanning three-quarters of the surface of the planet. In this interview, I talked with Cunliffe about the...

Pratik Shah is a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, and he’s a 2009 recipient of ASM’s Raymond W. Sarber award, granted to recognize students for research excellence and potential. His research focuses on polyamines and polyamine biosynthesis and transport systems in Streptococcus pneumoniae.  He’s studying polyamines with...

Abigail Salyers is a Professor of Microbiology and the G. William Arends Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her research focuses on the ecology of microorganisms in the human body and the comings and goings of antibiotic resistance genes, particularly genes in Bacteroides species.  Dr. Salyers is ASM’s 2009 Graduate Microbiology Teaching...

Arthur Guruswamy is a clinical microbiologist in Virginia’s Department of General Services Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services and the winner of ASM's Scherago-Rubin Award in recognition of an outstanding, bench-level clinical microbiologist.  His particular interest lies in mycobacterial and fungal diseases, including tuberculosis.  In his work, Mr. Guruswamy places a lot of emphasis on...

Dr. Frances Arnold is a professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (most of us know it as Caltech).  Dr. Arnold’s research focuses on evolutionary design of biological systems, an approach she is currently applying to engineer cellulases and cellulolytic enzymes for manufacturing biofuels.  This country’s energy security can look pretty bleak when...

Stanley Plot kin is Professor Emeritus at the Wistar Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.  A renowned vaccinologist, Dr. Plotkin is, perhaps, best known for developing a highly successful vaccine for rubella back in 1968.  We are still using the same vaccine 40 years later.  Dr. Plotkin has been honored with the inaugural Maurice Hilleman / Merck Award for his lifetime of de...

Christine Biron is the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Brown University in Providence, and she focuses her research program on the mechanisms of the innate immune system – the body’s system of non-specific munitions for fighting off pathogens.  Dr. Biron is also a newly elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology . When a pathogen gets on or in your b...

Joseph DeRisi is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research focuses on two distinct areas: malaria and new viral pathogen discovery.  Dr. DeRisi is this year’s recipient of the Eli Lilly and Company Research Award, granted in recognition of fundamental research of unusual merit in microb...