With anticipated occupancy early 2025, Berkeley Lab’s newest building Biological and Environmental Program Integration Center (BioEPIC), is located in the beautiful Berkeley hills overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. As part of Berkeley Lab’s Earth Month celebrations, a Research SLAM was hosted by Biosciences (BSA) / Earth and Environmental Sciences Areas (EESA) to raise awareness of the work that will take place in the BioEPIC. For the third annual BioEPIC SLAM early career researchers from four Science Focus Areas (SFA) gave 3-minute talks about their research to a hybrid audience, who voted for their favorites.
Jinwoo Im, a postdoctoral researcher who works with Michelle Newcomer in the Climate & Ecosystems – Ecology Department of EESA, represented ENIGMA at the 2024 BioEPIC SLAM. A hydrogeologist, performing computational modeling/simulation; he is a specialist in mechanistic AI-driven reactive transport models. Jinwoo joined the Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies (ENIGMA) SFA last year and is really changing the way that we integrate our data with a ModEx (model-experiment) approach. Jinwoo generated his background image using OpenAI and provided the following title and transcript of his talk:
Jinwoo provided the following transcript of his talk:
“Predictive Modeling of Nitrogen Cycling Across Scales: Linking Microbial Communities to Hydrogeology
I’d like to start my presentation by referring to human history, especially in the early stage of human civilizations. In this time period, people built communities in a vast range of earth environments, such as forest, desert, high plateau, and Arctic areas. As people adapted to each environment, they established their distinctive communities, developing different skills and cultures. And these ways of surviving feedback on the very Earth’s environment supporting us.
Just like people, microbes are also forming different communities across vastly unique regions of the subsurface: rhizosphere zones, vadose zones, variable saturated zones, and even contaminated zones. Similarly, microbes also impact their own environments, such as through acidification, weathering, clogging, and greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, nitrous oxide emissions from the subsurface are special because they represent more than 50% of the total global emissions.
My work in the ENIGMA project aims to understand when and how much nitrous oxide is emitted from the subsurface in response to rainfall events; what role subsurface microbial communities have on these emissions. In order to do that, I’m building a field-scale reactive transport model for nitrogen species in the subsurface. This field-scale model is coupled with an omics-level module that allows us to model microbial communities based on their genomic information. With this linkage across scales, the final model is able to show how different microbial communities emerge and evolve over a hydrological cycle in each region of the subsurface, and what functionalities they have contribute to nitrous oxide emissions.
This cross-scale model becomes more realistic and scientifically meaningful when it is calibrated against the field data. We have an intensive sampling site in the field, which we call the subsurface observatory. We collected soils, water, and microbes and analyzed them in laboratories. Our large team’s science integrates into one mechanistic model across scales, which ultimately improves our understanding about environmental impacts on microbial communities and ecological impacts from microbial communities.
Just as humans are building, constructing, and changing our own environments, so are microbes, in a way that changes the very planet we live on.”
Congratulations again to Jinwoo for representing ENIGMA Science Focus Area. Thank you to all the SLAM participants, Biosciences / Earth and Environmental Sciences Area teams and others who planned and participated in the event.