Sallie Watson Chisholm | |
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| Born | 1947 (age 77–78) Marquette, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Skidmore College University at Albany, SUNY |
| Known for | Study of phytoplankton, especiallyProchlorococcus |
| Awards | National Medal of Science Alexander Agassiz Medal (2010) Crafoord Prize (2019) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Marine biology |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Sallie Watson "Penny"Chisholm (born 1947) is an Americanbiological oceanographer at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution ofocean microbes. Her research focuses particularly on the most abundant marine phytoplankton,Prochlorococcus, that she discovered in the 1980s with Rob Olson and other collaborators.[1] She has aTED talk about their discovery and importance called "The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet".[2]
Chisholm was born inMarquette, Michigan and graduated fromMarquette Senior High School in 1965.[3] She attendedSkidmore College and earned a PhD fromSUNY Albany in 1974. Following her Ph.D., she served as a post-doctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1974 to 1976.
Chisholm has been a faculty member at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976 and a visiting scientist at theWoods Hole Oceanographic Institution since 1978. Her research has focused on the ecology of marinephytoplankton.[4] Chisholm's early work focused on the processes by which such plankton take up nutrients and the manner in which this affects their life cycle on diurnal time scales. This led her to begin usingflow cytometry which can be used to measure the properties of individual cells.
The application of flow cytometry to environmental samples led Chisholm and her collaborators (most notably Rob Olson andHeidi Sosik) to the discovery that small plankton (in particularProchlorococcus andSynechococcus) accounted for a much more substantial part of marine productivity than had previously been realized. Previously, biological oceanographers had focused on silicaceousdiatoms as being the most important phytoplankton, accounting for 10–20 gigatons of carbon uptake each year. Chisholm's work showed that an even larger amount of carbon was cycled through these small algae, which may also play an important role in the globalnitrogen cycle.
In recent years, Chisholm has played a visible role in opposing the use ofiron fertilization as atechnological fix foranthropogenic climate change.[5]
In 1994, Chisholm was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT.[6]
Chisholm has been a member of theUnited States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since 2003 and a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1992.
In January 2010, she was awarded theAlexander Agassiz Medal, for "pioneering studies of the dominant photosynthetic organisms in the sea and for integrating her results into a new understanding of the global ocean."[7]
She was a co-recipient in 2012 of the Ruth Patrick Award from theAssociation for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.[4] In the same year, she became one of the inaugural Fellows of theEcological Society of America.[8]
Chisholm received theNational Medal of Science from PresidentBarack Obama on February 1, 2013.[4]
In 2013, she was awarded theRamon Margalef Prize in Ecology, "for being one of the most productive, charismatic and active researchers on biology and marine ecology".[9]
On May 24, 2018, she was awarded the Doctor of Science degree byHarvard University.[10]
In 2019 she received theCrafoord Prize in Biosciences, "for the discovery and pioneering studies of the most abundant photosynthesising organism on Earth, Prochlorococcus".[11] This prize is considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize (for which there is no Biosciences category). Chisholm was honored at the Crafoord Prize Symposium in Biosciences[12] at which 6 internationally prominent scientists spoke (in order of presentations):Alexandra Worden (then at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany),Corina Brussaard (NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, The Netherlands), Ramunas Stepanauskas (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, US), Rachel Foster (Stockholm University, Sweden), Francis M. Martin (INRA French National Institute for Agricultural Research, France) and David Karl (University of Hawaii, US).
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