Jizhong Joe Zhou (ENIGMA principal investigator, affiliate faculty in Berkeley Lab’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area, director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma, has been elected as a member of American Academy of Arts and Science (AmAcad). 
He will participate, along with the other newly elected members, in the 2023 Induction formal ceremony on Saturday, September 30, 2023 at Cambridge, MA, where the Academy’s headquarters are located.
At the University of Oklahoma, Zhou is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor and Presidential Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, and holds positions in the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science and in the School of Computer Science, both in the Gallogly College of Engineering.
He is an international leader in genomics-enabled microbial environmental sciences, known for his pioneering advances in developing both cutting-edge experimental and computational metagenomic technologies to address frontier environmental, engineering, and ecological questions. Find his publications here
AmAcad honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together, as expressed in their charter, “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Their work has helped set the direction of research and analysis in science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy, education, the humanities, and the arts.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences should not be confused with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). With Joe Zhou’s election, he joins lumineries such as– from their earliest members Alexander Hamilton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maria Mitchell, Alexander Graham Bell to other distinguished members including Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, Barbara McClintock, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Martha Graham, John Hope Franklin, Georgia O’Keeffe, E. O. Wilson, Madeleine Albright, and Colin Powell. International Honorary Members have included Charles Darwin, Wislawa Szymborska, Laurence Olivier, Mary Leakey, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Akira Kurosawa, and Nelson Mandela. Current members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than two hundred and fifty Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. A list of current Academy members in the field of Evolution and Ecology are available here.
He has been a U.S. Ambassador to the International Society of Microbial Ecology and an Honorary Director for the Chinese Association of Microbial Ecology – a major professional organization for microbial ecology in China. CAME established an award under his name in 2017 to recognize Outstanding Microbial Ecologists.
His science leadership is also demonstrated by his professional service, as an editor-in-chief for mLife, a senior editor for The ISME Journal, an associate editor for Microbiome, a former senior editor for mBio and former editor for Applied and Environmental Microbiology. In 2022, he contributed to a report, Microbes and Climate Change – Science, People, and Impacts published by the American Society for Microbiology, that examines the relationship between microbes and climate change.
Learn more about Zhou’s work through the Institute for Environmental Genomics at ou.edu/ieg.