Sallie (Penny) Chisholm

Biographical Statement: Sallie (Penny) W. Chisholm studies the biology, ecology, and evolution of the single most abundant marine phytoplankton species in order to understand the forces that shape microbial ecosystems. She holds a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Biology and Civil and Environmental Engineering. She served as Director of the MIT Earth System Initiative (a precursor to the Environmental Solutions Initiative), and was formerly Director of the MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program in Oceanography and Oceanographic Engineering, as well as a key participant of The Darwin Project.

Research Interests: The focus of research in the Chisholm Laboratory is the marine cyanobacterium, Prochlorococcus – the most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. Over the past few decades we have been developing Prochlorococcus as a model system for cross-scale systems biology, studying not only the genetic diversity of the global “collective” but also its unctional and ecological implications. We are motivated by the perspective that it is higher order interactions within and among populations, and adaptations along environmental gradients, that shape the information that encodes the machinery of life. As such, we use Prochlorococcus as a guide to help us understand the forces from which living systems emerge.