C-DEBI Research Support > Request for Research Proposals

Katrina Edwards on the Atlantis

I have always been fascinated by life in extreme places on the planet. And somehow I have managed to do projects on microbes from places like Antarctica, boiling hotsprings in Yellowstone and Kamchatka, acid pools, and more. The extremes are fascinating to me because they tell us a lot about the limits of life as well as indirectly about life in "normal" places.

And of course, I am not alone. Many many scientists are fascinated by life's extremes. But not everyone ends up studying life in extreme environments of course. One reason for this is that many extreme environments that might be of interest are kind of hard to study. Consider the deep sea. Not so easy to do work there and just getting samples can be a massive undertaking.

Just imagine though. What if there were a way to "tag along" on an existing project studying life's extremes at no cost to you or your grants? Even better what if there were a way to get extra funds to not just tag along on a project but to carry out detailed research at the same time?

Well, amazingly, there is such a chance right now. The C-DEBI "Center for Dark Energy Biosphere" project is calling for proposals. C-DEBI Research Support > Request for Research Proposals

A "work" trip to Catalina Island: USC, Wrigley, C-DEBI, dark energy biosphere, Virgin Oceanic, Deep Five, & more

Panorama of Catalina Island

Well, the last few days have been completely eye opening for me. I have been on a little trip to the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center near the town of Two Harbors on Santa Catalina Island. Alas, this has not been a vacation. This has been work trip. I was invited a bit ago to come to a workshop here by Bill Nelson, a friend and colleague of mine I used to work with at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). Bill is part of a project called the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI). The workshop he invited me to was to discuss evolutionary studies as part of this project.

I note this is a general post about the trip - I will post more about the individual science topics including C-DEBI and Virgin Oceanic later.

As is usual, I did not fully commit to going to the workshop immediately and I dragged out committing for a very long time (driving Bill I am crazy I am sure).  But eventually I accepted and then kept flip-flopping on exactly when I would go, but eventually settled on dates too.

What is C-DEBI:

When Bill first invited me to this workshop, I had no clue what this C-DEBI project was.  And Bill must have assumed I knew because he did not provide any detail about what C-DEBI was.  So of course, that is what that Google thing is for.  And what I found was quite intriguing:

A simple description comes from their web site:

Welcome to the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI), a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Science and Technology Center on the deep biosphere. Our mission is to explore life beneath the seafloor and make transformative discoveries that advance science, benefit society, and inspire people of all ages and origins. We are a multi-institutional distributed center establishing the intellectual, educational, technological, cyber-infrastructural and collaborative framework needed for transformative experimental and exploratory research on the subseafloor biosphere.