Katerina Georgiou

Degree: Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley
Research: Earth system science
Joined LLNL: October 2020

Research at LLNL: Katerina studies carbon and nutrient cycling in soil and how these cycles respond to changes in climate and vegetation across spatiotemporal scales. She is particularly interested in the role of microbial communities in modulating ecosystem- to global-scale soil organic matter decomposition and formation. She uses a combination of mathematical modeling, statistical upscaling, and data syntheses to inform model formulations that capture emergent microbial dynamics. By integrating experimental data with mechanistic models that can resolve microbial- to ecosystem-scale processes, her research aims to improve predictions of terrestrial carbon cycling under future novel conditions.

Bio: Katerina Georgiou is a Lawrence Fellow in the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate. She earned a B.S. (2012) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, with minors in mathematics and chemistry. Katerina completed her Ph.D. (2018) in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on soil biogeochemical modeling and carbon-climate feedbacks. She received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and spent the final year of her Ph.D. as a DOE SCGSR Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Prior to joining LLNL, Katerina was a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University.