Kristen DeAngelis, Ph.D.
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Kristen DeAngelis, Ph.D., leads a team of researchers who integrate microbial, biochemical and bioinformatics tools to understand how soils form and degrade due to climate change, and then applies this understanding in development of next-generation lignocellulosic biofuels.
She earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of California Berkeley and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Joint BioEnergy Institute before moving to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she currently is an associate professor of microbiology. DeAngelis was selected to be a UMass Distinguished Faculty Lecturer and winner of the Chancellor’s Medal (2021), a Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow (2020), a UMass Public Engagement Faculty Fellow (2019) and an NSF ADVANCE Faculty Fellow (2021-2022) focused on equity in STEM.
Her lab studies the microbial physiology, ecology and evolution of microbes as they respond to climate change, with a focus on a long-term field manipulation experiment, in which a forest field site has been exposed to warming for 30 years. Her current work employs model soils, a culture collection of thousands of strains and a suite of computational tools to clarify the role of microbial diversity and bacterial activity in soil health, lignocellulose transformation and carbon storage.
She earned her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of California Berkeley and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Joint BioEnergy Institute before moving to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she currently is an associate professor of microbiology. DeAngelis was selected to be a UMass Distinguished Faculty Lecturer and winner of the Chancellor’s Medal (2021), a Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow (2020), a UMass Public Engagement Faculty Fellow (2019) and an NSF ADVANCE Faculty Fellow (2021-2022) focused on equity in STEM.
Her lab studies the microbial physiology, ecology and evolution of microbes as they respond to climate change, with a focus on a long-term field manipulation experiment, in which a forest field site has been exposed to warming for 30 years. Her current work employs model soils, a culture collection of thousands of strains and a suite of computational tools to clarify the role of microbial diversity and bacterial activity in soil health, lignocellulose transformation and carbon storage.