Jed A. Fuhrman

Dr. Jed A. Fuhrman is the McCulloch-Crosby Chair of Marine Biology, and Professor of Biology. Fuhrman studies the distribution, diversity, and activities of a wide range of microorganisms living in marine systems, including viruses, bacteria, archaea, protists. Despite great strides in our understanding about the importance and diversity of marine microbial communities, most of what we know tends to show how the system works in a piecemeal fashion rather than as a big picture. Marine microorganisms are controlled by many influences, which include externally-imposed features like fundamental characteristics of their physical and chemical surroundings, as well as complex interactions among the organisms, such as cross-feeding, competition, cooperation, predation, and infection. One of the primary projects in the Fuhrman lab thus aims to generate a fundamental understanding of principal interactions and feedback loops among major players of marine microbial communities. In another project, Fuhrman is exploring global marine microbial biodiversity with molecular biological techniques his lab has helped improve, which has enabled him to identify major new taxonomic groups and make better estimates of the total diversity found in these communities and its role in ecosystem function. His team discovered a major new group of Archaea inhabiting the deep sea and other novel microbial groups in coral reefs and other ocean habitats. His work also was among the first to point to the significance of marine viruses. Other recent projects include measurements of human pathogenic viruses at recreational beaches as a potential health hazard, where his  lab has worked on innovative ways to make such measurements relatively easy and inexpensive. Through this work, Fuhrman’s team has helped to link cases of illness to exposure to microbial and viral pathogens in the coastal zone. Fuhrman has received numerous awards for his work, including the Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Faculty Award and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Medal, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in addition to his American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership. His papers, which appear in journals such as Nature, Nature Reviews Microbiology, PNAS, Marine Biology, and ISME Journal, have a wide and deep impact. Fuhrman is an ISI Highly Cited researcher with an h-index of over 95 and more than 35,000 cumulative citations, leading his citation record to be in the top 0.5% of all published researchers.