Julie Huber


Julie Huber is an associate scientist in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She previously was an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, an associate scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the associate director of the MBL's Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution. She also serves as the associate director of the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, a National Science Foundation-supported program headquartered at the University of Southern California.

Early life and education

Huber spent her youth in Chicago and has cited frequent visits to the local Shedd Aquarium as part of her inspiration to pursue a career in marine biology. Huber was an undergraduate at Eckerd College in St Petersburg, Florida and received her B.S. in marine science in 1998. She received her Ph.D. in biological oceanography from the University of Washington in 2004 for work with oceanographer and astrobiologist John Baross on the microbial ecology of underwater volcanoes.

Academic career

Huber began work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory, a facility in Woods Hole, Massachusetts affiliated with the University of Chicago, in 2005; she became an assistant scientist there in 2007. She joined the faculty at Brown University as an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in 2008. She became an associate scientist at MBL and the associate director of the Josephine Bay Paul Center in 2013, and an associate professor at Brown in 2014. She moved her laboratory to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in June 2017.
Since 2015 Huber has served on the editorial board of the scientific journal Environmental Microbiology and as a senior editor of mSystems, an open-access journal published by the American Society for Microbiology. Huber is also active in public outreach and science communication. You can find her on Twitter @julesdeep or Instagram @jules02543.

Research

Huber's research addresses questions that are central to the nature and extent of life on Earth in one of its least explored corners, the deep ocean. It is focused on microorganisms, who for more than three billion years have served as engines of Earth's biosphere, driving essential biogeochemical cycles that shape planetary habitability. Exploration of the sea over the last 40 years has resulted in astounding discoveries about the extent and diversity of life in the deep ocean, pushing our understanding of the intimate connections between the biosphere and geosphere to the extremes, including the discovery of chemosynthetic ecosystems at hydrothermal vents and active microbes buried in sediments, kilometers beneath the seafloor. In fact, the global ocean comprises Earth's biggest microbiome, with at least half of the ocean's microbial biomass occurring beneath the ocean floor.
Her main environment of interest is the largest actively flowing aquifer system on Earth, the fluids circulating through oceanic crust underlying the oceans and sediments. There is a vast flow of fluid exchanging between ocean basins and crustal reservoirs and mediating transport of heat, solutes, genetic material, microorganisms, and viruses. Despite our advancing knowledge about life in the deep ocean, our understanding of microorganisms in the rocky oceanic crust and the fluids flowing through it is limited. The biogeochemical consequences of an extensive population of microbes living in the subseafloor remains unknown, and the potential for production of new biomass within the crust is rarely considered in traditional oceanographic paradigms of carbon cycling or microbial food webs.