From iron oxides to infections

Abstract

I was fortunate to have met Terry Beveridge early during my time in graduate school, when my advisor, Francois Morel (a geochemist), recognized the importance of my having a microbiologist on my PhD advising committee. At the time, I was studying microbial precipitation of arsenic trisulfide (As_2S_3) by Desulfotomaculum auripigmentum and needed the help of a geomicrobiologist to take electron micrographs of my samples (Newman et al., 1997). What better person to ask than Terry Beveridge? Not knowing much about what I was doing, I naively went off to Guelph to spend a week working in Terry’s laboratory during the fall of 1994. Little did I know that this would be the start of one of the most inspirational scientific and personal relationships of my career. From that week forward, I turned to Terry whenever I had a question about microbiology, and looked forward to his responses: Terry had a way of making me feel like I had hit upon something profound (when in fact my questions were pretty trivial), and his answers not only were thoughtful and informed, but had the effect of getting me to think about other problems that were much more interesting.