User:Sjkrau1992/sandbox

Victoria Orphan is an American Geobiologist. She currently holds the James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology position at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The scope of her research includes marine microbial communities that depend on oil and gas seeps, nitrogen, carbon and sulfur cycle in the marine sediments.

Education and Career
Victoria completed a Bachelor’s degree (1994) in Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). It was at UCSB where Victoria developed the interest of microbiology after taking a microbiology course by Edward DeLong. In 2002, under the guidance of Edward DeLong, now a professor of oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa, Victoria completed a Doctoral degree in biology at UCSB. During her graduate studies at UCSB, Victoria, incorporated geologic isotopic tracer methods with molecular genetics to understand the consumption of hydro carbon sources in marine systems. After graduating from UCSB she became a National Research Council Associate for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) AMES Research Center from 2002 to 2004. Victoria then started her assistant professorship in 2002 at Caltech, then achieved her associate professorship in 2010, and is now the James Irvine Professor at Caltech since 2016.

In addition to her professorship at Caltech, Victoria, since 2008 is an Adjunct Professor at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and in 2016 became a McArthur Foundation Fellow. In 2015, she was elected a fellow to the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) for her contributions to understanding microbes in anaerobic ecosystems by coupling Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization (FISH) and Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS). She is also a Senior Scientist of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, a Science and Technology Center funded by the National Science Foundation and headquartered at the University of Southern California. She has also been a faculty mentor for over 100 students at the Microbial Diversity Course located in the Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Work at California Institute of Technology
At Caltech, Victoria, has been first author and corresponding scientist on several influential peer reviewed journal entries. The major group of microbial communities that she and her group study, inhabit deep-sea sediments which can be difficult to find, retrieve, and culture. To observe these communities, she has coupled FISH (Flourescent In Situ Hybridization), SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry), isotope tracer technologies to help better understand metabolism that is driven by methane.

Her group, along with colleagues, also study natural methane seeps in the deep oceans and how groups of archaea coupled with sulfate reducing bacteria act as a sink of carbon from a methane seep. She does this by investigating geochemical processes with molecular genetics techniques such as, polymerase chain reactions (PCR) and FISH to understand the relationship between methane oxidizing archaea and sulfate reducing bacteria. Her work studying the anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) processes convert methane to carbonates. This process collectively, is important to understand because the result is a sink of a potent greenhouse gas that would otherwise go through the water column and into the atmosphere and be hazardous to marine life and increase the effects of climate change. The increase in temperature from climate change can also lead to the increased melting rate of methane gas hydrates which can lead to more methane flux into the atmosphere, increased anoxic water, and ocean acidification. With this in mind, Victoria's research is incredibly important to help balance the Earths biogeochemistry.

She continues to mentor young scientist pursuing graduate degrees and postdocs and many of her former students have achieved faculty positions at other institutions.