María Hernández LimónGraduate Student

Research Focus:

Microbial Ecology/Biogeochemistry

Email:

mdhernandez@uchicago.edu

Biography 
María D. Hernández-Limón was born in Mexico and moved to Illinois when she was ten years old. Maria became the first person in her family to graduate from college when she earned a B.S. in geology-biology in 2014 from Brown University. During the summer of her junior year, Maria helped to collect and analyze water quality data to assess hypoxia in Narragansett Bay, which led to her interest in aquatic ecosystems. After graduating, Maria worked with the Schuler Scholar Program in Chicago, a program that prepares underserved students from low-income communities to excel in college. In August 2016, Maria moved to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and joined the Dyhrman laboratory, which focuses on understanding the interaction between phytoplankton and their geochemical environment. In 2017, María’s research focused on comparing gene expression data from phytoplankton grown at ambient and increased CO 2 in order to elucidate how increases in CO 2 influence phytoplankton physiology. Results from this research were published in Frontiers in Microbiology. María’s current research aims to describe the expression patterns of important process in Emiliania huxleyi from samples collected in the Pacific Ocean. At University of Chicago Maria hopes to explore the microbial diversity of the Great Lakes and how study how these organisms might respond to climate change.   

Selected Publications 
Hennon GMM, Hernández Limón MD, Haley ST, Juhl A, Dyhrman ST. Diverse CO 2 induced responses in physiology and gene expression of six eukaryotic phytoplankton. Frontiers in Marine Science, published online 19 December 2017. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.02547