Kelli Mullane joined Costa Vetriani’s Deep-Sea Microbiology Lab in the spring of 2015 and she is currently completing her George H. Cook honors thesis. Kelli has been working on various aspects of the microbiology of marine geothermal environments, from the production of quorum-sensing signals by deep-sea bacteria to the isolation of the first pressure-adapted thermophilic Epsilonproteobacterium from a deep-sea hydrothermal vent. Currently, Kelli is investigating how this bacterium behaves at pressure up to 300 bars, using a state-of-the-art high-temperature and high-pressure chemostat in a collaborative project between the Deep-Sea Microbiology Lab and the Geophysical Lab at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Soon after graduation, Kelli will move back to native California and she will join Doug Bartlett’s lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography where, as a graduate student, she will continue to study marine microorganisms.
