Member Profile
Donald Pan
Resilience and Adaptive Governance of Stressed Watersheds: An IGERT Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The University of Nebraska—Lincoln is looking for doctoral students interested expanding their education from traditional training in natural sciences, computer science, and social sciences to a broader, multi-disciplinary... More »
About Me
Straddling the interface between what may be considered living or nonliving, viruses are the most numerous organisms in the environment—-tens of billions per gram of soil! Recent findings also show that they may serve as the single largest reservoir of genetic information on Earth.
During my undergraduate study at UC Berkeley I developed a capacity for conceptualizing nature from the scale of bacteria all the way to the scale of planetary systems. Therefore I became interested in how biological activity at the smallest scales (that of bacteria and viruses) can have ecosystem-level and global-level consequences. Currently, I am interested in the ecology of viruses and how viruses interact with microorganisms in shallow terrestrial subsurface environments to influence redox processes. My dissertation research will investigate the complex interactions between viruses and bacteria and how they contribute to the system-scale behavior of resilience. I will approach this from an interdisciplinary perspective, using tools from ecology, geochemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics.
In addition, I am also interested in how the activity of microorganisms can be considered and utilized in the context of environmental management. This could mean the response of microorganisms to environmental change or utilizing microorganisms for bioremediation or modeling microbial activity to understand all the effects of human-induced changes to ecosystems.
