Professor
University of Washington, School of Oceanography and Astrobiology

Jody Deming received her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Maryland (1981) on the subject of pressure-adapted bacteria associated with sinking particles, sediments and sediment-ingesting invertebrates in the deep sea. As an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and later as Research Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University (until 1988), her research expanded to include the study of novel thermophilic microbes emanating from deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Since moving to the University of Washington, where she is Professor of Biological Oceanography, she has directed the Marine Bioremediation Program and helped to establish the Marine Molecular Biotechnology Laboratory and the nation's first graduate training program in Astrobiology. Her current research continues to focus on various types of "extremophiles" in the ocean, centering primarily on the rapidly changing Arctic environment. There, her microbiological, oceanographic, and astrobiological interests converge on the study of particle flux in a cold ocean and its attentuation by cold-adapted microbes and of ecosystem shifts and likely extinctions attributable to loss of sea ice.

Much of her research has been undertaken as part of large interdisciplinary and international programs, for which she has often served in leadership roles as chief scientist shipboard or for various steering committees, symposia and special issues, particularly in her role as Chair of the International Arctic Polynya Program (since 2000). She teaches regularly on wide-ranging issues in biological oceanography and has trained numerous graduate and undergraduate students, publishing over a hundred papers in the process.

Among other committees, she serves on the US Polar Science Board, which also acts as the nation's committee for the International Polar Year 2007-2008, and is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology (1999) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003). Chaired the International Polynya Symposium 2001 in Quebec City in September.