Announcing the Evansville Museum’s 2024 Scientist in Residence, Dr. Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert.

Dr. Trembath-Reichert will present a public lecture at the Evansville Museum on Friday April 19th from 6:00 - 7:00 PM. Tickets are FREE but seating is limited. To reserve your seats, please visit https://emuseum.org/rsvp. This exciting event is brought to you by the Downtown Optimist Club, The DoubleTree by Hilton, and a gift from Margaret Dennis in memory of her parents, Jim and Ana Ward.

Dr. Trembath-Reichert is an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is a microbiologist and biogeochemist, with a focus on microbially mediated Earth-life interactions.

Dr. Trembath-Reichert’s public lecture is titled “What Lies Beneath: Who Lives Miles Beneath the Seafloor and What are They Up To?”. The following is a description of her highly anticipated lecture:

Windows into the Earth’s subsurface are few and far between. Yet from what glimpses we have had, there appears a boundless capacity for tiny life forms (microbes) to survive, if not thrive, in this vast underground world. However, access to these systems is limited and requires massive engineering and technology efforts to observe. Therefore, we know much less about microbes living down in the dark than their surface counterparts living among us. Through the application of highly sensitive methods at single-cell resolution from a range of subsurface systems, we find these microbes have a massive range in growth rates and cell sizes. They also have the capacity to sustain changing conditions and switch between food sources accordingly. Overall, these investigations improve our understanding of the microbial role in these energy limited environments on Earth, with astrobiological implications for similar systems elsewhere.