The Ferrari Lab have recently become members of UNSW’s Evolution & Ecology Research Centre

Welcome to A/Prof Belinda Ferrari and her team, Nicole Benaud, Kate Montgomery, Angelique Ray, Sin Yin (Nicky) Wong, Devan Chelliah, Eden Zhang, Carol Gutierrez Chavez, Dana Tribbia, and Jessica Dai as the Centre’s newest members. Belinda is currently an ARC Future Fellow, Deputy Head of School, and the Director of Research for the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences. She is also a member of the Centre for Marine Science and Innovation. Belinda’s research area is environmental microbiology specialising in Antarctic soil biodiversity and performs discovery-based and applied research. She is passionate about integrating single cell technologies with innovative cultivation methods and genomics to uncover the diversity and functional capacity of uncharacterised soil microbiomes. By doing so, her team recently discovered a novel carbon fixation process where cold adapted bacteria literally ‘live on air’. They coined this microbial-based process ‘atmospheric chemosynthesis’ and published these findings in the prestigious journal Nature. Read the article on it here. The team also works on using microbes as indicators of soil health, for the assessment of ecosystem recovery during bioremediation and for developing site-specific ecotoxicity assessments. Belinda’s future goals are to continue to challenge our understanding of the nutritional limits required for life, while training the next generation of confident scientists.