Dianne Newman Biography

Dianne Newman is a microbiologist who studies how microorganisms have shaped the Earth and how they continue to do so in current medicinal settings. Newman combines techniques and perspectives from a variety of fields to study the evolution of ancient microbes' metabolic processes (i.e., ways of obtaining needed energy and nutrients) and their effects on the geochemistry of their environments. He holds degrees in environmental engineering, Earth science, geobiology, and molecular genetics. One of the main lines of research is looking at how ancient microorganisms survived before the advent of easily available air oxygen. Newman examines current microbes that resemble parent creatures from the planet's early past, informed by colleagues' investigations of the chemical makeup of ancient rock formations. Her research has revealed how certain ancient bacteria respired (or "breathed") arsenic and iron, utilizing them for metabolic electron-transfer reactions. Newman's research on the methods by which bacteria use iron instead of water as a photosynthetic substrate helped to promote the theory that this sort of anoxygenic metabolism accelerated the formation of early banded iron formations. Newman and colleagues also discovered that the presence of 2-methylhopanes, an organic biomarker, in ancient rocks is not a reliable indication of cyanobacteria and the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis, contrary to popular belief. Rather, the existence of these chemicals is likely a marker of various species and environmental stressors, a discovery that is revealing the sorts of niches where these compounds support the survival of various bacteria. Newman is applying what she's learned about ancient bacteria to better understand how modern bacterial communities develop and survive in low-oxygen conditions with current medicinal relevance. In the oxygen-limited circumstances of mucus-filled lungs, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a multidrug-resistant bacterium that infects individuals with cystic fibrosis, produces biofilms. Her research into how P. aeruginosa makes and uses phenazines, which are electron-shuttling chemicals that help the bacteria survive in diseased lungs, might lead to more effective therapies for this and other chronic infections. Newman is improving our knowledge of the influence of microbes on human health from the dawn of time to the present day by bridging diverse disciplines and seeing the similarities that underpin seemingly divergent processes. From 2007 to 2010, she was the Wilson Professor of Geobiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to Caltech as the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology in the Divisions of Biology and Biological Engineering and Geological and Planetary Sciences. Newman's research has been published in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geobiology, Nature, and Science. Dianne Newman graduated with a B.A. from Stanford University in 1993 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. From 1998 to 2000, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, and from 2000 to 2007, she was a member of the faculty at the California Institute of Technology.

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