Microbiology

Joan L. Slonczewski received their BA from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University, where she studied bacterial motility with Robert M. Macnab. Since completing postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, they have since taught undergraduate microbiology in the Department of Biology at Kenyon College, where they earned a Silver Medal in the National Professor of the Year program of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. They have published numerous research articles with undergraduate coauthors on bacterial pH regulation as well as five science fiction novels, including The Highest Frontier and A Door into Ocean, both of which earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. They conducted fieldwork on microbial ecosystems in Antarctica, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. They have served as At-Large Member representing Divisions on the Council Policy Committee of the American Society for Microbiology and as a member of the editorial board of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. John W. Foster received his BS from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science (now the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia) and his PhD from Hahnemann University (now Drexel University School of Medicine), also in Philadelphia, where he worked with Albert G. Moat. After postdoctoral work at Georgetown University, he joined the Marshall University School of Medicine in West Virginia. He is currently teaching in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine in Mobile, Alabama. Dr. Foster has coauthored three editions of the textbook Microbial Physiology and has published more than 100 journal articles describing the physiology and genetics of microbial stress responses. He has served as Chair of the Microbial Physiology and Metabolism division of the American Society for Microbiology and as a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal Molecular Microbiology. Erik R. Zinser received his AB from Kenyon College, where he worked in the lab of coauthor Joan Slonczewski. He received his PhD in microbiology from Harvard Medical School for his research with Roberto Kolter on the evolution in Escherichia coli during prolonged starvation. He performed his postdoctoral research at MIT with Penny Chisholm on the ecology of the marine cyanobacterium, Prochlorococcus. He currently teaches in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He and his students study phytoplankton and associated bacteria from marine and freshwater environments. Laboratory and field studies by his group led to the development of the Black Queen Hypothesis, an evolutionary theory that explains the adaptive nature of genome streamlining in free-living microbes. He has been a member of the American Society for Microbiology since college and has served on the editorial boards for the journals Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Environmental Microbiology.