Lecture followed by Q&A
Witte Hall, 998 Avocado Avenue, Newport Beach
Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 7:00pm
SPOTLIGHT ON SCIENCE
One Micron Long, One Mile Deep: How Deep-Sea Microbes Shape our Planet
Victoria Orphan, PhD
James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology
Wednesday, April 28, 2027, 7:00pm
Doors open at 6:30pm
Victoria Orphan is the James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology at Caltech, and the current Director of the Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory on Newport Bay in Corona del Mar. Her research focuses on microbes in deep-sea ecosystems and their links to microbial communities in shallow coastal waters, including our Bay. In shallow waters, her team studies the role that microbes play in sequestering carbon in anaerobic seagrass beds. In the deep ocean, they have been focusing on the microbes that sustain organisms thriving on methane in some of the deepest submarine canyons off the Pacific Coast. This work has taken Dr. Orphan on a number of submersible dives more than a mile deep to photograph and sample these strange creatures. Professor Orphan has received numerous honors, including a DOE Early Career Research Award (2010), a MacArthur Fellowship (2016), and election as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2021).
