Dr. Newman started her independent career at Caltech in 2000 and is currently the Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology. Her doctoral and postdoctoral training combined environmental science (MIT) and molecular microbiology (Harvard Medical School), giving her a keen appreciation for the importance of accurately characterizing the microenvironments surrounding microbial populations and communities to understand the activities of cells within them. Her honors include the US National Academy of Science’s Award in Molecular Biology and a MacArthur Fellowship, but she is most proud of her trainees, who have gone on to lead successful scientific careers in academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector. Dr. Newman founded Caltech's Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions in 2012, co-directed the Microbial Diversity Course at the Marine Biological Lab (2014-2017) and currently leads the Ecology and Biosphere Engineering Initiative for Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. She has served on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory since 2021.
Dr. Newman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on elucidating mechanisms of bacterial energy conservation and survival when oxygen is scarce, emphasizing how redox-active extracellular electron shuttles sustain metabolically attenuated biofilms.
Her laboratory uses Pseudomonas aeruginosa and its phenazine metabolites as a model system. Combining bacterial physiological, genetic, imaging and electrochemical approaches, her research has challenged our conception of the roles "antibiotics" play in nature and provided a rich platform for discovering mechanisms that sustain an extremely low-power metabolism. She looks forward to discussing the potentially broad conceptual relevance of her lab's findings to other organisms and niches at the meeting.
