Jennifer Mosher

Biography

Jennifer Mosher, Ph.D., grew up playing in the trickling streams behind her childhood home in Salem, Ohio, digging up rocks, observing fish and finding frogs. The water there was cool and clean at least on the surface. But Mosher, now a microbiologist, knows water doesn’t need to take on a dramatic hue or smell to be polluted. Microbes, single-cell organisms that play essential roles in every facet of human life, can be a much better pollution detector than human senses. Mosher studied microbes and their reactions to contaminated water as part of the Higher Education Research Experiences (HERE) Faculty Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The program, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) for the U.S. Department of Energy, presents opportunities for students of all academic levels, including faculty like Mosher, to study real-world energy and environmental problems in a top-tier federal facility. Mosher, like many HERE participants, intends on submitting her research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal upon completion of the project. Mosher and her team, composed of microbiologists, chemists, geochemists and environmental scientists, used glass vessels known as bioreactors to examine how subsurface microbial communities react to changes in the chemical composition of groundwater. To do this, they pumped non-contaminated groundwater into several reactors, allowing the microbial community to develop. Then, they introduced filtered groundwater to the process from a distant well with high levels of nitrate, a naturally occurring element that can be toxic in high doses and is also of concern in global carbon cycles.

Research Interest

Microbes, single-cell organisms