<figcaption> Credit: © Ric Frazier Productions</figcaption>
Credit: © Ric Frazier Productions

Victoria Orphan wanted to be a marine biologist ever since kindergarten. She even wrote it down in a Dr. Seuss book called My Book About Me. It still sits in her childhood bedroom, which she had painted to resemble a deep-sea scene.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Orphan studied marine biology and was headed in the direction of big-game ecology when she took a course with Ed DeLong, now a microbiologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She had a realization. Methodological advances, especially in phylogenetics, were beginning to open new doors for microbiologists. Meanwhile, she says, "There were too many questions and not enough answers in microbial ecology."

Orphan did her doctorate work under DeLong, and he encouraged her to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where her work carried her to the sea floor. She studied anaerobic oxidation of methane...

Title: Assistant Professor, geobiology
Age: 34
Representative Publications:

1. V.J. Orphan et al., "Multiple archaeal groups mediate methane oxidation in anoxic cold seep sediments," Proc Natl Acad Sci, 99:7663-8, 2002. (Cited in 76 papers) 2. V. J. Orphan et al., "Methane-consuming archaea revealed by directly coupled isotopic and phylogenetic analysis," Science, 293:484-7, 2001. (Cited in 140 papers) 3. S.K. Goffredi et al., "Evolutionary innovation: a bone-eating marine symbiosis," Environ Microbiol, 7:1369-78, 2005.

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