Antje Boetius

Who is Antje Boetius?

Antje Boetius is a German marine biologist presently serving as professor of geomicrobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, University of Bremen. She received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, with 2.5 million euros in funding, in March 2009 for her study of sea bed microorganisms that affect the global climate. She was the first person to describe anaerobic oxidation of methane, and believes the Earth's earliest life forms may have subsisted on methane in the absence of molecular oxygen. She has also suggested such life forms may be able to reduce the rate of climate change in future.

Boetius received her biology degree from the University of Hamburg in 1992, her doctorate in biology from the University of Bremen in 1996, became an Assistant Professor in 2001 and an Associate Professor in 2003. Her research interests are in the marine methane cycle, the ecology of chemosynthetic habitats, microbial processes of early diagenesis in deep-sea sediments, pressure and temperature effects on microbial processes, microbial symbiosis, geomicrobiology and the global carbon cycle.