Senior Scientist Susannah Tringe has been named Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division Director. She has been serving as the interim director of the EGSB Division since last May 2020.
Over her seventeen year career at Berkeley Lab, Tringe has become known as a leader in the field of metagenomics, and has influenced the careers of countless researchers around the world as the deputy of user programs at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI). Tringe will continue to lead the Microbial Systems Group at the JGI, which focuses on sequence-based approaches to studying microbial community assembly, function, and dynamics.
Tringe is the scientific lead for implementation of the EcoPOD prototype version 1, which is a new high-tech ecosystem chamber that can replicate interactions between organisms and environments in natural systems. The EcoPOD leverages Berkeley Lab’s world-leading capabilities in plant, microbial, and environmental science, as well as computation, modeling, and engineering, to develop laboratory-based infrastructure that can mimic aspects of field research sites while retaining the level of control typical of lab experiments.
Major foci of her current research efforts are the roles of microbial communities in wetland carbon cycling and the interactions of plants with their associated microbiomes. Tringe’s research interests include terrestrial carbon cycling, particularly microbial factors influencing methane fluxes at terrestrial-aquatic interfaces, and the contributions of plant microbiomes to stress tolerance.
