Rachel Poretsky, Ph.D.
University of Illinois Chicago
Rachel Poretsky, Ph.D., hails from the great urban microbial hotspot of Brooklyn, N.Y., and is currently
a professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago, located in another major urban microbial hotspot.
Poretsky has a B.S. in biology from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in marine microbiology from the University of Georgia. She completed postdocs in geomicrobiology at Caltech and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. Her laboratory specializes in aquatic microbial ecology with the broad goals of linking patterns in microbial communities to their activities using omics approaches, with particular interests in food webs, antimicrobial resistance and public health. She is driven by questions of how microbes interact on different scales, how they are influenced by their surroundings, how they respond to perturbations and the role of microbial diversity. She applies these questions to freshwater, engineered and even human systems—all places where microbes can influence human health and climate change. She is currently the scientific lead for Chicago’s and Illinois’ wastewater surveillance efforts, where she partners with Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Rush University Medical Center and the Chicago and Illinois Departments of Public Health. Her work has been funded by a variety of agencies, including NSF, CDC, NOAA and NIH.
a professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago, located in another major urban microbial hotspot.
Poretsky has a B.S. in biology from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in marine microbiology from the University of Georgia. She completed postdocs in geomicrobiology at Caltech and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. Her laboratory specializes in aquatic microbial ecology with the broad goals of linking patterns in microbial communities to their activities using omics approaches, with particular interests in food webs, antimicrobial resistance and public health. She is driven by questions of how microbes interact on different scales, how they are influenced by their surroundings, how they respond to perturbations and the role of microbial diversity. She applies these questions to freshwater, engineered and even human systems—all places where microbes can influence human health and climate change. She is currently the scientific lead for Chicago’s and Illinois’ wastewater surveillance efforts, where she partners with Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Rush University Medical Center and the Chicago and Illinois Departments of Public Health. Her work has been funded by a variety of agencies, including NSF, CDC, NOAA and NIH.