Dr. Newman is the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and leads the Ecology & Biosphere Engineering Initiative of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. She is an American Academy of Microbiology fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Newman received her BA at Stanford University, earned her PhD in Environmental Engineering at MIT and trained as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. She joined the Caltech faculty in 2000 as the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Geobiology and Environmental Science. From 2007-2010 she was the Wilson Professor of Biology and Geobiology at MIT, and from 2005-2016 she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Dr. Newman’s research focuses on the co-evolution of microbes and their environments, with an emphasis on bacterial mechanisms of energy conservation and survival when oxygen is scarce. The contexts that motivate her research span modern and ancient sedimentary deposits to chronic infections and plant-microbe symbioses, yet are linked by similar physiological questions concerning electron transfer. She has received various honors for her work, including the National Academy of Science’s 2016 Award in Molecular Biology for her "discovery of microbial mechanisms underlying geologic processes