Edward F. DeLong
University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Primary Section: 63, Environmental Sciences and Ecology Secondary Section: 27, Evolutionary Biology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2008)
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Biosketch
Edward DeLong received his Bachelor of Science in Bacteriology at the University of California Davis, and his Ph.D. in Marine Biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. He was a Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara in the Department of Ecology for seven years, Senior Scientist and Science Chair at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for seven years, and a Professor at MIT, in the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Biological Engineering for ten years. For the past seven years, DeLong has served as a Professor of Oceanography at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa. DeLong has served as co-Director for the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education, and the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology. DeLong is an elected Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as Vice President, President, and Past President of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.
Research Interests
DeLong’s scientific interests address central questions in oceanography and microbiology, with a focus on microbial genomics, biogeochemistry, and microbial ecology, and evolution. Understanding the emergent properties of microbes in their natural environmental settings, from genomes to biomes, has remained a central goal throughout his career. A large part of DeLong’s efforts has been devoted to the study of microbes and microbial processes in the ocean, combining field-based approaches and genomic technologies. Development and application of genomic, biochemical and metabolic approaches to study marine microbial communities and processes has been a longstanding, central area of interest for DeLong’s lab. His work has ranged from temperate, to tropical, to polar environments, studying microbial processes from surface waters to the deep-sea. His research accomplishments include the discovery of rhodopsin-based phototrophy in bacteria, the demonstration of the abundance and widespread distribution of planktonic marine Archaea, and recognition of specific lineages of Archaea in the anaerobic oxidation of methane. DeLong currently is coupling high resolution, oceanographic field surveys with advanced genomic technologies, to map the diversity, variability of marine microbial communities in four dimensions in situ, and interpreting those dynamics in the context of global biogeochemical cycles. His current interests also focus on the nature of marine viruses and viral-like particles, and the structural and functional differences of particle-attached microbial communities from surface waters to the deep ocean, and their roles in the global carbon cycle.
