Susannah Green Tringe is the Director of the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as well as Director of the Center for Restoration of Soil Carbon by Precision Agricultural Strategies (RESTOR-C).  She received her undergraduate degree in Physics from Harvard University then went on to a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University, and joined Berkeley Lab as a postdoc at the Joint Genome Institute in 2003. There she developed techniques for using DNA sequence data for comparative analysis of whole microbial communities, rather than individual organisms. Her current research focuses on using nucleic acid sequence data to study communities of microbes from diverse environmental niches and understand their assembly and function, with the goal of harnessing them for improved environmental and agricultural outcomes. These studies involve a combination of field, lab, and computational approaches to link molecular data to ecosystem processes. Her major research interests include how microbes interact with plants to affect growth, health and stress resistance, how microbes influence greenhouse gas uptake and release in wetlands and agricultural systems, and how microbes can be exploited to enhance soil carbon storage and to break down natural and man-made contaminants.