Linta Reji is a microbial ecologist and a biogeochemist focusing on microbial elemental cycling in terrestrial and coastal systems. She received her Ph.D. from the department of Earth System Sciences at Stanford University, where she studied archaea mediating nitrogen transformations in the coastal ocean. Her postdoctoral research at the department of Geosciences at Princeton University focused on mechanistic underpinnings of microbially mediated trace gas cycling in soils and wetlands.
Her research seeks to develop a mechanistic understanding of microbial responses to environmental change and their consequences for biogeochemical processes in terrestrial and coastal systems. Specifically, she studies various microbially mediated transformations within the carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen cycles. Her research broadly encompasses the following two focal areas: (i) microbial trace gas cycling in the face of natural and anthropogenic global change; and (ii) ecosystem implications of the generation and maintenance of microbial diversity. Her work integrates perturbation experiments in the lab with spatio-temporally resolved field observations, using a combination of tools from molecular microbial ecology and biogeochemistry.