J.F. Banfield
1999 was an extraordinarily busy year, marked most clearly by an unprecedented amount of professional travel. This was primarily due to participation in workshops (2), presentation of talks at national and international conferences (9), and presentation of lectures promoting work of our geomicrobiology and low-temperature mineralogy group (11) at universities and national facilities (ranging from the Australian National University, to NASA, Johnson Space Center, Houston, to as far north as Reykjavik, Iceland). Many of our group members also presented talks at national meetings (31 in total!). We also managed several trips to our Iron Mountain and Mt. Lassen field sites in Northern California, as well as one field trip to our granite weathering profiles in Australia.
Research progress in our group has been focused in three mainareas. Firstly, we continue to work on nanocrystalline materials, exploring the ways in which small particles differ in their thermodynamic properties and kinetic behavior from large crystals. This is extremely relevant to Earth science because of the large volumes of few to few tens of nanometer-diameter particles produced by weathering and biomineralization reactions. It is also relevant to materials science and solid state chemistry (in fact, our first publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry appeared in 1999). Work in this area involves Heng (Dr. Hengzhong Zhang) and Michael Finnegan (a new student).
Secondly, we are working on silicate and phosphate mineral weathering through study of natural granite weathering and soil profiles and laboratory experiments. This work involves Sue (Dr. Susan Welch), M.S. student Anne Taunton, and undergraduate senior thesis student Cara Santelli. Astrobiology and the search for biosignatures is also a focus of our efforts, involving several group members mentioned elsewhere, as well as scientist Dr. Bill Barker. A related new direction within this work is biomineralization. A significant redirection toward this topic occurred in 1999, drawing into our group new student Jeffrey Brownson, new Weeks Postdoc David Fowle, and new postdoc Masha (Maria) Nesterova. New post doc Matthias Labrentz has begun a new initiative to understand microbial precipitation of iron oxides in near-neutral ground water. Yohey Suzuki is leading our effort to combine the geochemical, mineralogical, and biological approaches to reveal the ways in which organisms cause uranium biomineralization, and the impact of microbes on uranium mobility in the environment.
Finally, we continue to unravel the microbiology and geochemistry of our acid mine drainage site at Iron Mountain. This work has benefited from the addition of new Ph.D. student Greg Druschel (working on geomicrobiology of sulfide dissolution and sulfur oxidation chemistry) and two microbiology senior thesis students (Michelle Lutz and Steve Smriga). Phil (Dr. Philip Bond) has almost completed an enormous effort to sort out the bacterial and archaeal populations at the site and has established himself as perhaps the world expert on insitu molecular biological study of microbial communities. Tom Gihring has tried to abandon Iron Mountain for the far more beautiful Mt. Lassen field site, where he will continue his work on arsenic and biological arsenic transformations (but he occasionally misses that wonderful acid mine drainage aroma). In all of these studies, we are moving towards more biochemical approaches (in pursuit of functional molecules) and hope to have our first genome sequence for an Iron Mt. archaeal isolate in January, 2000.
In addition to mineralogy, gems, and geomicrobiology-related courses (2) taught in 1999, I began a collaboration with Phil Brown and Tom Gihring to develop the Department's second completely on-line course. This has been developed (largely by Phil and Tom, to date) from the internationally known UW-Madison "Why Files" site (Science Behind the News). The course will be first taught in Spring 2000. Connection between this effort and the UW-Madison K-infinity outreach program of Dean Millar will allow us to reach beyond the university to offer Earth science-related educational materials to the secondary school system and general public.
Overall, 1999 was an amazing year. Our research is exciting, our group is terrific, and 2000 promises to be better than ever.
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