Matthew Sullivan, professor, Department of Microbiology, College of Arts and Sciences, and Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, College of Engineering, has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to research “How do viruses impact global ocean metabolism?” in France. From January-June 2025, Sullivan will assess how ocean viruses alter the flow of nutrients and energy throughout the global oceans.
“This Fulbright project will involve close collaboration between my Sullivan Lab at Ohio State, which specializes in studying viruses in complex systems, and that of Damien Eveillard at the University of Nantes, France, which has developed novel community metabolic modeling approaches and data integration techniques,” Sullivan shares.
The microbiome is the collection of bacteria, viruses, and other microscopic organisms that live in, on, and around us. Microbiomes are also important in other animals, plants, and environments like the oceans and soils. “One of the grand challenges in microbiome science is to take the thousands of different microbes observed in any sample and figure out what role they play in the ecosystem. Community microbial metabolic modeling represents a new frontier in mechanistically understanding those roles, and then using that framework to engineer microbiomes from disturbed back to healthy states,” Sullivan explains.
The work will be part of a broader French-led Tara Oceans Consortium effort. This Consortium burst onto the scene with a special issue in Science in 2015, which built the foundations for Eco-Systems Biology. This new discipline within the life sciences integrates pattern recognition and contextualization of ecology with mechanistic and data integration approaches of systems biology. Ohio State has played a big role in these efforts with students and postdocs leading and contributing to many of the leading papers in this space. On the new Fulbright research, Sullivan will collaborate with Tara Oceans leadership at the Oceanographic Laboratory in Villefranche-Sur-Mer, France, the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the Roscoff Marine Laboratory, France.
Sullivan expects three deliverables from his Fulbright project. First, develop intimate understanding of community metabolic modeling approaches and increase shared collaboration among experts. Second, renew and deepen ties with Tara Oceans leadership as new expeditions and waves of science are planned. Third, connect France’s cutting-edge Tara Oceans leaders with other world leading scientific networks of complementary and synergistic science domains.
“I am looking forward to improving my French language skills, interacting with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and also developing a proposal that could be submitted to the NSF Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program to codify collaborative relationships with the community of French marine researchers,” Sullivan explains.
“The specific teams I am engaged with and would like to connect include the NSF-funded soil microbiome climate change EMERGE Biology Integration Institute, the Chilean CEODOS and the Center for Mathematical Modeling, and the German “MicroVerse” Research Excellence Cluster. This would accelerate highly interdisciplinary science in the U.S., South America, and the EU with focus on developing transformative advances in microbiome science leveraging Tara Oceans resources, and then translating those to other ecosystems like soils and humans,” Sullivan notes. He also plans to interact with virus researchers at the
A Fulbright U.S. Student in Northern Ireland in 1997-98, Sullivan is a College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Professor, a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator alumnus, co-director of the Ohio State Infectious Diseases Institute Microbial Communities Program, founding director of Ohio State Center of Microbiome Science, and on the leadership team for the EMERGE Biology Integration Institute. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2020, and a fellow and Global Ambassador for Applied Microbiology International in 2022. Sullivan was also recently named to the class of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows.
Fulbright Program
For more information about the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, visit fulbright.osu.edu or contact Joanna Kukielka-Blaser.