Rika Anderson is a scientist!

Dr. Rika Anderson is an environmental microbiologist (a scientist who studies microbes and the environments where they live), an oceanographer (a scientist who studies the ocean), and an astrobiologist (a scientist who is looking for life in space). Her lab is at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She does her field research on ships in the middle of the ocean, and sometimes in submersibles, like in the photo above.  She has done research in places like Axial Volcano, which is an underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon, and the Lost City, a place in the Atlantic Ocean with hydrothermal vents on the top of an underwater mountain. She says about her research, "I study microbes that live at the bottom of the ocean, in places where hot water shoots out of the seafloor and makes beautiful chimneys. Those chimneys are home to worms, crabs, shrimp, and tons of microbes."

A scientist's job is to ask questions that we don't know the answers to and then work to find the answers through observation, experiments, and careful thinking. A scientific question that Rika would like to answer is "I would like to know how viruses in the deep sea can help microbes adapt to their environment. We usually think of viruses as making us sick (like when we have a cold), but I want to know if viruses can actually be helpful for the microbes that live in the ocean."

You can learn more about Rika and her research here.

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