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 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, her research expanded to include the study of novel thermophilic microbes emanating from deep-sea hydrothermal vents.  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 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, her research expanded to include the study of novel thermophilic microbes emanating from deep-sea hydrothermal vents.  

Since moving to the University of Washington (1988), where she is Professor of Biological Oceanography, she has directed the Marine Bioremediation Program (until 1999) and helped to establish both the UW Marine Molecular Biotechnology Laboratory and the nation's first graduate training program in Astrobiology. Much of her current research focuses on cold-adapted "extremophiles" in the rapidly changing Arctic Ocean and its environs. There, her microbiological, oceanographic and astrobiological interests converge on the study of particulate matter – from living microbes and their viruses to large aggregates of sinking detritus – to determine the fate of organic carbon and the associated microbes in a cold ocean with a diminishing ice cover.  The roles of extracellular enzymes and exopolymers in facilitating microbial life in the cold figure prominently in her work.  

From the  beginning of her academic career, here 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 has received the US Coast Guard Arctic Service Medal (1993) and an honorary doctorate (2006) from the Université Laval in Quebec City in recognition of her international contributions to Arctic research.  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 on the Joint Jupiter Science Definition Team to plan the next mission to Europa, an icy moon to Jupiter believed to harbor a deep ocean.  She is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology (1999) and the National Academy of Sciences (2003).