Margaret Weng

Maggie Weng is currently a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her research focuses on understanding trace metal availability and uptake at deep-sea methane seeps to help illuminate why life requires a specific suite of essential elements. She earned her PhD from Georgetown University in 2024 with Dr. Sarah Stewart Johnson, where her research focused on microbes in hypersaline environments, and her bachelor's degree in 2019 from Washington University in St. Louis. She is interested in microbial persistence at the edge of possibility, including extreme environments and polluted sites, and how microbial communities contribute to bioremediation and ecosystem stability. She always says yes to fieldwork and as a consequence has found herself in the Atacama Desert, Kerlingarfjöll, Iceland, and Western Australia as well as a commercial salt factory in San Diego, CA. When not in the lab she is an avid writer, hiker and knitter. Her fiction and nonfiction writing have appeared in The Los Angeles Review and Northern Woodlands magazine. When out in the woods, she appreciates a good biofilm almost as much as a good view.