Metals and oxygen: planetary and human homeostasis

Karen is a Professor in Environmental Engineering whose expertise is in rebuilding soils to reverse soil degradation. She leads Durham University's SMART soils lab which is guided by the fact that it is the soil microbiome that builds soil structure and ultimately provides soil ecosystem services. These are things like flood and drought resilience, nutrient neutrality and net zero and the team are increasingly interested in soil's ability to help with net biodiversity gain. Her scientific expertise is in carbon and pollutant stabilisation on mineral surfaces and she publishes in high impact journals like Nature and Hazardous Materials on these topics. She was recently awarded the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Prize in 2023 for her science as well as for her efforts to encourage more women into science through her work in soil literacy. She has always worked across disciplines in order to champion her rebuilding soils agenda as raising soil up the political agenda is a societal issue as much as a technical one. She believes strongly that it is our attitudes, behaviours and comprehension of soil that is arguably the bigger barrier to rebuilding our soils than the actual soil science itself.

Professor Jack A Gilbert earned his PhD from Unilever and Nottingham University in 2002 and completed postdoctoral training at Queens University, Canada. He was a senior scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and later led Microbial Ecology at Argonne National Laboratory and the Microbiome Center at University of Chicago. In 2019, he joined UC San Diego as a Professor in Pediatrics and at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he directs the Microbiome and Metagenomics Center. Professor Gilbert co-founded the Earth Microbiome and American Gut Projects and has authored over 450 publications. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of mSystems and co-authored Dirt is Good. He also founded BiomeSense Inc and leads the $200M NIH Nutrition for Precision Medicine program. He is the current President of Applied Microbiology International the oldest society for applied microbiology in the world.

Steve Chivasa is an Associate Professor in Biosciences and a research leader at Durham University. He serves as the Co-Director of the Durham Centre for Crop Improvement Technologies (DCCIT) and is the Biosciences Lead for the strategically important, interdisciplinary SMART Soils Lab. After earning his BSc and MSc from the University of Zimbabwe, he completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on understanding stress-adaptive responses in plants and microbes. Specifically, his group investigates how cell-cell communication and secreted signals govern collective responses in microbial biofilms and synchronize adaptive responses across plant cells in tissues. This foundational work is actively being translated for exploitation with industrial partners in the agritech and biotech sectors. Recent efforts have explored the role of metal biology in stress adaptation across prokaryotic and eukaryotic systems.

Antony Dodd is based at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, which is a centre for excellence in plant and microbial sciences. His group investigates fundamental and more translational aspects of circadian regulation, generally using plants and bacteria as experimental models. Antony’s PhD was at Newcastle University, followed by several years as a post-doc in Cambridge. He was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship that he took initially to the University of York, and then the University of Bristol where he held his first faculty position. He moved to the John Innes Centre in 2019, where he is currently Head of Department of Cell and Developmental Biology.

Professor Andrew K Sweetman is the leader of the Seafloor Ecology and Biogeochemistry research group and chair of Benthic Ecology and Biogeochemistry at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), UK. He holds a PhD in deep-sea ecology from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and has held positions at various world-leading research institutions including Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Florida State University, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Andrew studies seafloor biodiversity and ecology and has a strong focus on the impact of anthropogenic stressors on shallow and deep-sea benthic ecosystems. Over the last 17 years, he has led 32 research projects on diverse topics including assessing the effects of i) invasive species on seafloor biogeochemistry and ecosystem functioning, ii) aquaculture on deep fjord ecosystems, iii) mine-tailings deposition, massive sulphide and polymetallic nodule mining on deep-sea ecosystems, and iv) studied the effects of climate change on shallow and deep-ocean systems.

Caroline Peacock is Professor of Biogeochemistry in the School of Earth and Environment at University of Leeds, UK. Her research explores how mineralogical processes control elemental cycling and help shape the past, present and future Earth system. Caroline obtained her PhD. in geochemistry at University of Bristol, before joining University of Southampton and then University of Leeds. She received the European Association of Geochemistry Houtermans award for early career scientists in 2015 for exceptional contributions to geochemistry, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2018, a Mineralogical Society of America Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2018-19 and a Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2019-21. Caroline is currently Vice President of the European Association of Geochemistry.

Emilie Combet is a Professor of Nutrition at the University of Glasgow in the School of Medicine. Her expertise lies in nutrition and the lifecycle, with a focus on health trajectories, food systems and sustainability/equity.

Her research adopts a multidisciplinary perspective, combining lab-based techniques, cross-sectional and interventional methodologies to study how food/diets (including whole foods, specific nutrients, and the way we eat) impact health throughout life, from the time peri-conception to old age. She has a particular interest in the “farm to fork to society” nexus and its implications for all stakeholders from a community, industry and clinical settings.

Emilie has extensive experience managing interdisciplinary research projects and developing strategic partnerships. Since 2023, she has held the role of Director of the Scottish Alliance for Food, one of four Alliances for Research Challenges funded by the Scottish Funding Council. Through SCAF, with colleagues across sectors and disciplines, she is exploring how transdisciplinary research can address the complex challenges faced by our food system through the lenses of health, sustainability and equity.

Dr Marcy Kingsbury received her BA in neuroscience from Hamilton College and her PhD in developmental neurobiology from Cornell University. She conducted postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego and the Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. Dr Kingsbury is currently an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Assistant Investigator for the Lurie Center for Autism and the Mucosal Immunology Biology Research Center at Mass General Brigham where she studies microbiome-gut-brain signaling in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders. One of her current research avenues examines how the hormone oxytocin resolves cellular stress, re-establishes homeostasis and builds cellular resilience through hermetic processes following physiological stressors. She is particularly interested in how oxytocin and related peptides may have evolved to manage over-reactivity to the side-effects of oxygen with the advent of aerobic respiration at the mitochondrial membrane.