On 22 December 2023, Prof. Chuanlun Zhang from the Southern University of Science and Technology delivered a presentation titled 'Metabolic activities of marine ammonia-oxidizing archaea orchestrated by quorum sensing'.
Professor Dr. Chuanlun Zhang received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 1994, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1994 to 1998, taught as an assistant professor in the Department of Geology at University of Missouri from 1998 to 2002 and as an associate and full professor (tenured) at the University of Georgia from 2002 to 2014. He also served as a chair professor at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology in Tongji University in China from 2008 to 2012. He was invited to join the Southern University of Science and Technology of China in 2017 to lead a program in Microbial Oceanography and Geomicrobiology and serves as the vice chair of the Department of Ocean Science and Engineering.
Professor Zhang has been dedicating his career to biogeochemical and geomicrobiological research as well as student training for over 20 years. His research interests include the role that microorganisms play in the environment and energy transfer, life evolution and global climate change, and technology driven paradigm shift in ocean ecological research. His research strength lies in integration of lipid biomarkers, stable isotopes and molecular DNA to study microbial (particularly archaeal) activities in carbon and nitrogen cycles. Major research topics include, but are not limited to, geomicrobiology in ocean trenches, deep subsurface, hot springs and other extreme environments; biogeochemistry associated with marine gas hydrates; genomics of marine and terrestrial archaea; development and application of climate and environmental proxies; and applying drone array technologies for monitoring ocean environment change and collecting water samples for simultaneous examination of ecological changes across time and space.