Dr. Jaber Abbaszadeh

I'm a microbial ecologist working on biological soil crusts - the thin microbial communities that live at the surface of desert soils and hold them together. They tolerate prolonged drought, intense UV radiation, and temperature swings that would shut down most life. I want to understand the mechanism behind that tolerance, not just the pattern.

To get at that, I combine metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and single-cell methods like NanoSIMS to capture what microbial communities are doing under drought and when water is available.

I did my PhD at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, working on the ecology and evolution of Deinococcus, one of the most radiation-resistant organisms we know of. That work took me across deserts, Antarctic soils, and geothermal environments. Studying Deinococcus taught me to think about persistence as a genomic strategy. Biocrusts let me ask the same question at the community scale.

The question I keep returning to: how does a cell, or a whole community, stay viable through drought  and switch back on the moment water returns?