Karen Gibb Australian Microbial Ecology 2017

Karen Gibb

Professor Gibb has made major scientific contributions to the field of applied microbiology. She was first to identify the uncultivable phytoplasma pathogens in Australian crops and first in the world to physically map the genome of these pathogens. She shared this knowledge nationally and internationally and showed these pathogens were associated with several mystery diseases, saving industry millions of dollars. She and her team have also developed novel approaches to track biological and chemical environmental contaminants, some now adopted by government. At Charles Darwin University (CDU), Professor Gibb leads the Environmental Chemistry and Microbiology Unit that earns on average $1,000,000 per year, and is Co-Director of the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods. Her personal scientific output includes 136 refereed papers, over 3,300 citations and a h-index of 33. She has been a Chief Investigator on nine ARC funded grants, has earnt $6M of research projects and in 2006 was awarded the Northern Territory Research and Innovation Tropical Knowledge Award for Research. The core research strengths of the ECMU are: 1) the use of trace-metal and nutrient data combined with stable isotope data to determine the source of industrial and urban contaminants in tropical marine and terrestrial environments, and 2) Molecular and environmental microbiology and genomics to track the sources of biological contaminants in tropical aquatic environments.