Faculty
Estelle Couradeau
efc5279@psu.edu
814-863-1615
450 Agricultural Sciences and Industries Building
Assistant Professor of Soils and Environmental Microbiology
Department of Ecosystem Science and Management
Research
Our lab uses a combination of techniques including environmental omics and imagery to look at environmental microbiomes. We are interested at linking microbial physiology in-situ to the system emergent properties. We seek to understand which microbes are active, when they are active, where they are active and how they contribute to the biogeochemistry of the environment they live in. We mostly study soils with a special focus on biological soil crusts. Biocrusts are topsoil from arid land that cover 12% of the Earth continental area and were likely even more prominent before the development of land plants. Biocrust are built by microbial communities dominated by cyanobacteria that have fascinating properties such as the ability to form super filaments to move up and down in the soil or to resist extended periods of inactivity when the soil is dry.
Estelle Couradeau completed her Ph.D. in geomicrobiology at the University of Paris-Diderot (France), she worked on the intricate relationship between microbes and their mineral substrate. A topic that she further explored as a postdoc at the Arizona State University. During her time in Arizona she started working on soils and applied her analytical skills to arid land soils built by microbes. She became passionate about soils and their potential to be a lifeline for current global challenges. She further pursued that topic as a postdoc at the Joint Genome institute (LBNL) and worked on contaminated soils while completing her training in microbiomes characterization including omics techniques. She joined Penn State in early 2020 as an assistant professor in the Ecosystem Science and Management department. Her group focuses on the study of soil microbiomes, trying to understand which microbes are active and how their metabolism might be affected by the rapidly changing environmental conditions.
