Peter R. Girguis, Ph.D.
Peter Girguis is a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He earned his B.Sc. from UCLA and his Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara. He was also a David Packard Postdoctoral Fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He joined Harvard University in 2005, where he now resides as a Full Professor and the Co-Director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative. He is also an adjunct scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering group.
Broadly speaking, Professor Girguis studies how marine microbes and animals have adapted to their environments, and how their metabolic activity—in turn—shapes those environments. He is especially interested in animal-microbial partnerships, from deep sea worms that use symbiotic microbes to outgrow nearly every other animal and plant, to the giant whales whose microbes help them break down hard-to-digest foods. Girguis is also known for developing novel “open-design” instruments such as underwater mass spectrometers and microbial samplers, and he strives to make these tools available to the broadest research community, with the goal of democratizing science around the world.
Professor Girguis was a Distinguished Lecturer for the National Science Foundation, a Merck Co. Innovative Research Awardee, a recipient of the 2007 and 2011 Lindbergh Foundation Award for Science & Sustainability, the 2018 Lowell Thomas Award for groundbreaking advances in Marine Science and Technology, and the 2020 Petra Shattuck Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was recently named a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator for his research on marine symbioses. He has authored or co-authored approximately 140 publications, and also serves on several notable ocean science advisory boards.
