Our group investigates how biological processes interact with geological processes to make Earth, and potentially other planets and planetary bodies habitable. For example, we investigate the origins of oxygen, a biological process that, without burial of organic carbon and tectonics, would not have allowed oxygen to become the second most abundant gas on this planet. We ask how organism evolved to create carbonate rocks over geological time. How microbes evolved to interact with each other to form a planetary scale electron market which makes Earth resilient to mass extinctions of animals and plants.
