What are your major research interests?
Since I started hunting for fossils 25 years ago, I have been fascinated by extremely ancient life. I like to think about what Earth and life looked like billions of years ago. Names such as ‘Warrawoona’ and ‘Onverwacht’ still give me goosebumps. These 3.5 billion year old rock formations in Australia and South Africa apparently contain the oldest traces of life, but nobody knows what type of life and where it came from.
I actually originally studied chemistry, specializing in physical organic chemistry, and paleontology and the origin of life were hobbies. I am happy that I was able to combine these fields in what I like to call Paleobiogeochemistry. To study very ancient ecosystems, I extract molecular biological remains from sedimentary rocks. Molecular fossils, or biomarkers, are the hydrocarbon residues of lipids and other biomolecules. Many of these lipids have structures that are characteristic for certain groups of organisms, such as cyanobacteria or methanogens. In sedimentary rocks, these molecules are stable over hundreds of millions of years and we can use them to reconstruct ancient microbial ecosystems. Traditionally, the study of these molecular fossils belongs in the fields of organic and petroleum geochemistry, but they are increasingly important for paleoenvironmental studies.
As in traditional paleontology, to make sense of biomarkers detected, say, in Precambrian rocks, it is important to understand which lipid structures occur in what type of living organism. However, most microorganisms can’t be cultured and we only know a miniscule fraction of their lipid repertoire. I am therefore very exited about a project that I have started with Jill Banfield from UC Berkeley and Simon George from Macquarie University where we are trying to combine environmental genomics with a study of the entirety of lipids. We just returned from a very hot and muddy field trip in outback Australia and found some interesting sample sites.
What advantages and disadvantages are there to having cross-disciplinary research topics?
A great advantage of a new combination of fields is that you are more likely to find something fundamentally new, that you are able to claim your own scientific gold mine. I find it also very satisfying to get a broad overview over more than one field of research. On the other hand, it is definitely far more difficult to be an expert in more than one area, and there is the danger of spreading oneself too thin. The major disadvantage was summarized by the director of our institute: everyone is enthusiastic about multidisciplinary research… until it gets to academic promotion and funding. You are more likely to fall through the cracks as most reviewers will be expert in one field but not the other, and you are less likely to be well known in each of your disciplines, partly because you can only go to a limited number of conferences in each of your sub-disciplines
Did you always know you wanted to go into science?
Until 4 years of age, it was ‘Schwerstarbeiter’ (hard to translate, its German for ‘heavy worker’, the guy on a construction site who carries the bricks). From ages 4 to 6, I wanted to become a bulldozer driver (and still do), but for the following ten years I became the director of a little natural history museum that included three rooms in the basement of my parents’ house filled with mounted skeletons, gazillions of land and sea shells, feathers, eggs and other desiccated and often inordinately smelly eukaryotes. When I was 10, we moved from flat northern Germany to the mountainous south. I remember, when my family arrived at our new home town, we went on a walk through the steep vineyards. I picked up a piece of Triassic limestone and found an amazingly well preserved bivalve, Plagiostoma striata. My mother exclaimed that there must have been an ancient ocean that covered southern Germany in the past. I thought this was the most stupid idea I had ever heard. However, looking back, I am convinced that this really was THE moment when I decided that earth and life sciences was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
What advice would you give to students?
I totally agree with what Hope Jahren said in her interview: follow your bliss, do what you are most passionate about. I did not always follow this advice. When I was eleven, I went on a fossil hunting expedition to Holzmaden led by the Director of the Senkenberg Museum. When I exclaimed that I also wanted to become a paleontologist, the director cautioned that there was, on average, only one open position per year in all of Germany. About 20 years later, I was offered one of those positions, but when I had to enroll for my first course at university, I remembered the words of the Senkenberg Director. So, I didn’t study paleontology or geology but enrolled in chemistry instead (lots of jobs in the chemical industry in Germany with brilliant salaries, I suppose). Chemistry also turned out to be very exciting. However, while I spent all afternoons inhaling toxic fumes, my peers in the geology department went on field trips to South America collecting minerals…. so I illegally enrolled in geology in parallel (a student was not supposed to be able to cope with a second subject next to a Masters in Chemistry; ridiculous). In the end, the mixture turned out to be an unexpectedly good one: biogeochemistry.
How do you have time to eat?
I love to go to restaurants, particularly Nouvelle Australian Cuisine with bizarre dishes such as ‘Kangaroo Pizza Chop Suey’ or ‘Sweet and Sour Roast Lamb Peking Style’. The food in Canberra is so good and strange, I sometimes wonder how I have time to work.
If you could only research one thing for the rest of your life - what would it be?
Niccola Flynn. Definitely.
What do you do when you aren't teaching, researching, or writing?
I love endless hiking through mountains and deserts. Where else in the world can you walk 15 minutes out of a capital city and not see a single house or road, or hear a car for the rest of the week? I adore the solitude of the Australian landscape. Each day after work, I have a swim through murky Lake Burley Griffin where I join my friends, the 2-methylhopanoid producing cyanobacteria. Above all, I love birding. I know its daggy — you certainly don’t watch birds to be cool. But by the end of my life, I have the goal to have seen all eight extremely elusive and highly endemic species of grass wren. At the minimum, it is a wonderful excuse to hike through some of the remotest deserts in the world. In eight years, I have seen two of the wrens. Six to go.
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