Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Penny Chisholm public lecture will open Woese Symposium

Penny Chisholm, a professor of environmental studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will kick off the upcoming weekend symposium hosted by the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology with a free public lecture. No registration is necessary.

Chisholm’s lecture “Tiny Cells, Global Impact: A Journey of Discovery with a Microbe from the Sea” will begin at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 18 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center. A reception will follow.

The lecture is the first of the weekendlong symposium, “Looking in the Right Direction: Carl Woese and the New Biology” on Sept. 19-20 in recognition of the institute’s renaming. Registration for the conference is closed.

Chisholm’s lab works to advance understanding of the ecology and evolution of microbes in the oceans and how they influence global biogeochemical cycles. Over the past few decades, her lab has focused attention on one of the smallest and most abundant microbes in ocean ecosystems – a type of bacteria called Prochlorococcus, which is being developed as a model system for studying life across all spatial and time scales. 

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