I am a cross-disciplinary scientist trained as a microbiologist. My general interests are microbial physiology, microbial ecology, biogeochemical cycling, gene regulation, microbial metal respiration and Earth history. During my graduate work and post-doctoral research, I used genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology to understand microbial metabolism. My Master’s research at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, dealt with understanding the physiological response of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to hypoxia. For my PhD research I studied methanogenesis performed by the poorly understood archaea, in the lab of Prof. William Metcalf at the University of Illinois at Urbana. During this period I took, and subsequently taught, the Microbial Diversity Summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory. I was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research associate for a year in the lab of Prof. Dianne Newman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I studied photoferrotrophy performed by purple non sulfur bacteria. I thereafter moved to Peter Girguis' laboratory at Harvard University, where I used a combinatorial approach to study microbial metabolism at the environmental level. My projects focus on metal respiration, microbial extracellular electron transfer and hydrocarbon oxidation. I started my own lab at Washington University in St. Louis, where I work using microbes to find solutions to important problems affecting us today such as climate change, the energy crisis and environmental pollution. Along the way, my laboratory does a lot of basic research, which expands our understanding of the incredible metabolic diversity microbes display.