Kristen M. DeAngelis

Kristen M. DeAngelis is a professor in the department of Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts where she studies soil microbes in relation to climate change. Early life and education DeAngelis is originally from Watertown, Massachusetts. She graduated from Harvard University within the Biology department in 1997. DeAngelis received her Ph. D. in Microbiology from the University of California Berkeley in 2006. She subsequently worked as a Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkley National Lab and in the Deconstruction Division at the Joint BioEnergy Institute Career and research She is currently a lead researcher at the University of Massachusetts on soil microbes and their connection to global warming. Specifically, DeAngelis focuses on the adaptability of soil microbes and their responses to climate change in order to better understand soil ecology and its role as a carbon sink. Using plots of ground that have been artificially heated to warmer than surrounding earth, DeAngelis, along with other qualified researchers, is attempting to simulate climate change and its potential effects on Earth. This is a part of a long term study at the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, which has been going on since 1991. Her participation is key in discovering unexpected results, in which the scientists have observed changes in the composition and functional potential of soil bacterial communities which are correlated with alternating periods of accelerated and stationary CO2 release from the soils. Her current work evaluates the hypothesis that there is an evolutionary component to the soil bacterial response to long-term warming at this site.