News and Outreach: Sallie (Penny) Chisholm

An MIT ocean microbiologist and a Caldecott Award-winning author and illustrator have teamed up to produce a lavishly illustrated children's book that explains how the sun creates life on Earth through photosynthesis. Penny Chisholm, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, provided the science background for "Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life," which was co-authored and illustrated by Molly Bang. The book is designed to help children grow up with a better understanding of how plants use the sun's energy to photosynthesize, turning water and carbon dioxide in the air into carbohydrates and releasing the oxygen that makes it possible for humans—and countless other creatures—to exist. "Photosynthesis is arguably the most important phenomenon on Earth," Chisholm says, "Yet few people understand it. I've been on a mission [to educate the public about] how life works for some time, and decided the best way to get the word out—besides teaching ecology at MIT—is through a set of children's books. Molly was eager to take on the challenge." More ...

A new program to develop computational models of how marine microbes live and evolve in the global ocean has been launched to help researchers understand and simulate the relationships between climate change, marine ecosystems and the ocean carbon cycle. The collaborative effort is led by Mick Follows, and includes participants Penny Chisholm, Stephanie Dutkeiwicz, John Marshall and Chris Hill, among others. (More about the Darwin Project.)

Simulation condenses 10 years' evolution into five days of computing - Scientists at MIT have created an ocean model so realistic that the virtual forests of diverse microscopic plants they "sowed" have grown in population patterns that precisely mimic their real-world counterparts.