Anna Broerman

I am a graduate student in the Chemical Engineering department working jointly in the Santoro and O’Malley labs, where my research focuses on developing high-throughput genetic engineering workflows for hard-to-transform marine bacteria and archaea. Marine organisms such as ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB) play an essential role in oceanic nitrogen cycling and greenhouse gas production. Despite their ecological significance, current genetic tools for these organisms are limited. By developing generalizable approaches to non-model marine organisms, my work aims to enable functional genetic studies in organisms that are currently genetically intractable to advance our understanding of marine ecology and biogeochemical processes.