Postdoctoral Associate
Contact: 706-542-1122
Email: hefu@uga.edu

I am currently a postdoctoral research associate in Mary Ann Moran’s lab at the University of Georgia. Born and raised in China, I received a liberal arts education in Wuhan University with a major in Biology. Concerned about many pressing environmental issues yet equally impressed with the metabolic diversity of microbes, I joined Ning-Yi Zhou’s lab working on bioremediation. Very soon, however, I realized that more wonders, beauties and mysteries are hidden inside the microbial world. In 2011, I came to the US and joined Bill Metcalf’s lab at the University of Illinois, working on the metabolism of methylated sulfur compounds by Methanosarcina acetivorans, a model marine methanogen, and its impact to the global sulfur cycle and climate change. After earning his Ph.D. degree in 2017, I joined the Moran lab to delve deeper into marine microbial ecology/microbial oceanography. My research currently focuses on bacterial community assembly in model phycospheres, and is broadly interested in microbial physiology, ecology and evolution.

When not doing bench work, I enjoy reading science, history, philosophy, poetry and everything in between. While in graduate school, Itranslated Martin Blaser’s ‘Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues‘ into Chinese, which came out in 2016 and won the Chinese National Library Book Award in 2017.