Professor Victoria Orphan Named Member of AAAS

Victoria J. Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology and the director of the Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions (CEMI), has been honored as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). Orphan focuses on communities of microbial life involved in the cycling of elements such as sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen. She has spent decades studying the partnership of a species of bacteria and a species of archaea that live within deep-sea methane seeps in what is called a consortia, a kind of symbiotic aggregate of multiple species. [Caltech story]