Research Interests:

Jennifer Pett-Ridge is a senior staff scientist and group leader at LLNL who uses the tools of systems biology and biogeochemistry to link, identity, and function in environmental microbial communities. Recently awarded a DOE Early Career award to work on responses of tropical soil microbes to climate change, she has also pioneered the use of NanoSIMS isotopic imaging in the fields of microbial biology and soil biogeochemistry. As lead scientist of the LLNL Genomic Science Biofuels Scientific Focus Area (SFA) from 2009–2018 and more recently the LLNL Soil Microbiome SFA, she helps to coordinate multi-disciplinary teams that integrate biogeochemistry, stable isotope probing, NanoSIMS imaging, molecular microbial ecology, and computational modeling to understand biotic interactions and energy flow in microbial communities critical to soil nutrient cycling and sustainable biofuel production. She is the group lead for the newly-formed Environmental Isotope Systems group in the Nuclear and Chemical Sciences division and manages a portfolio of over $7 million in DOE, NSF, NASA and other funding. She helps to mentor a group of staff scientists, postdocs, and graduate students working on terrestrial and marine carbon cycling, plant-soil interactions, and development of new isotope tracing methods (El-FISH, Chip-SIP, STXM-SIMS) and collaborates frequently with scientists at academic institutions and other national labs. Pett-Ridge has published over 60 peer-review articles, including a patent ROI for the “ChipSIP” approach linking microbial identity and function using NanoSIMS analysis of microarrays.