The Gilhooly Lab

Matt’s paper was written up in Scientific American

by Bill GilhoolyNews March 1, 2023June 27, 2023Comments are Disabled

New NASA funding!

by Bill GilhoolyNews January 10, 2023June 27, 2023Comments are Disabled

We were funded by NASA to study how natural populations viruses control photosynthetic sulfur bacteria. Research shows that bacteria in seawater or corals are strongly influenced by viruses. We think that the blooms of purple bacteria in anoxic lakes may also be influenced by viral communities. If correct, this would revolutionize our understanding of the conditions that promote or prevent microbial blooms. To date, most of the controls have thought to been sunlight and sulfide; however, viruses may be the hidden figures behind the persistence and activity of photosynthetic bacteria.

This project is with: Alice Bosco Santos (University of Lausanne), Cynthia Silveira (U Miami), Joe Werne (U Pittsburgh) and Molly O’Beirne (U Pittsburgh)

More about NASA Exobiology here

ACS SEED sampling core

by Bill GilhoolyField and Labwork July 2, 2018October 17, 2018Comments are Disabled

Nahum and Bawi did an excellent job of sampling Ordovician drill core from Ben Datillo’s lab at IPFW.

Welcome ACS Project SEED interns

by Bill GilhoolyNews June 8, 2018November 1, 2018Comments are Disabled

Bawi Sung and Nahum Gerezgher are both American Chemical Society Project SEED interns in our lab this summer. Bawi is studying Ordovician carbonates and Nahum is studying iron chemistry of a northern Indiana lake. Both are doing an awesome job.

Bawi Sung (foreground) and Nahum Gerezgher (background) homogenizing samples.

Congrats to Fotis for winning a Sigma Xi grant!

by Bill GilhoolyNews June 1, 2018July 20, 2018Comments are Disabled

Fotis did it again by winning a graduate research award from Sigma Xi.

Congrats to Fotis for his GSA Research Grant 2018

by Bill GilhoolyNews April 18, 2018July 20, 2018Comments are Disabled

Fotis was awarded a GSA summer research grant. Nice job!

New DTT paper is published!

by Bill GilhoolyPublications February 22, 2018February 22, 2018Comments are Disabled

Congrats to Martin Kurek who recently published his undergraduate research project in Chemical Geology. We developed a method to use a reducing agent (DTT) to extract elemental sulfur. Nice job Martin! You can download a full copy of the article from the following link for free until April 13, 2018. Kurek et al., Chemical Geology, 481:18-26, 2018.

New sulfide-films method published!

by Bill GilhoolyPublications October 22, 2017November 27, 2017Comments are Disabled

Check out our films method that was published in Marine Chemistry.

We demonstrate that photographic film can capture the spatial concentrations and stable isotope compositions of dissolved sulfide from water columns and pore waters. These films can be used in a wide variety of environments such as our study of the highly dynamic production and oxidation of hydrogen sulfide in the mud of the seagrass meadow shown below.

Example of film deployed in seagrass bed. Photo by Roy Price.

Midwest Geobiology Symposium at IUPUI

by Bill GilhoolyMeetings September 30, 2017October 13, 2017Comments are Disabled

MWGB 2017 was a lot of fun. We had an excellent collection of talks and posters from several schools throughout the Midwest. Generous support from the Agouron Institute, School of Science, and the Department of Earth Sciences made this event possible. Special thanks goes to Lisa Pratt from IU Bloomington for her keynote address about the future of space exploration.

Class field trip to study the Ordovician.

by Bill GilhoolyField and Labwork September 17, 2017October 4, 2023Comments are Disabled

We took students on a tour of Ordovician rocks in Indiana and Ohio as part of my course in the Evolution of Earth and Life (G335). The field trip combined students from IUPUI, IPFW, and the University of Cincinnati.