Announcing the 2025 Simons Early Career Investigators in Aquatic Microbial Ecology and Evolution

The Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International have named six scientists as 2025 Simons Early Career Investigators in Aquatic Microbial Ecology and Evolution. The two-year awards are intended to help launch the careers of outstanding investigators in this area. These grants will be funded by the Simons Foundation International and administered by the Simons Foundation.

The awardees are:

Gregory Britten of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Bayesian machine learning for ecological data assimilation of marine microbial communities

Carolina Alejandra Martinez Gutierrez of the University of California, Santa Barbara
Exploring the role of distant evolutionary events on the ecology of dominant marine bacterioplankton

Allison Moreno of the University of California, Santa Cruz
Mechanistic response to nutrient stressors control marine deoxygenation

Daniel Petras of the University of California, Riverside
Understanding microbial transformation and storage of marine dissolved organic matter

Wei Qin of the University of Oklahoma
Assessing nickel utilization in marine urea-N oxidation

Kendra Turk-Kubo of the University of California, Santa Cruz
Coastal nitrogen fixation in an eastern boundary upwelling ecosystem