Halmos Faculty Organize Tiny Earth Conference

This June, Halmos College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Aarti Raja, Ph.D., chaired the annual Tiny Earth symposium. 221 instructors, students, and collaborators registered to attend, representing 88 academic institutions from 8 countries, 25 US states, and Washington DC. Faculty members Aarti Raja, Ph.D. and Julie Torruellas Garcia, Ph.D., attended the virtual Tiny Earth International Conference, which was run from the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, Madison, WI. Raja moderated several sessions at the conference. Her student Varun Rachakonda presented a poster and talk titled “Investigating the Microbiota from Unique Wetland Ecosystems, Torruellas Garcia’s student Jessica Hallet presented a poster and talk titled “The Race to Find Novel Antibiotics Produced by Soil Bacteria from Horse Stalls.” Torruellas Garcia’s talk was titled “A safer alternative method for detecting Type II secretion system inhibitors produced by soil bacteria”.

Tiny Earth was launched in 2018, however it began six years earlier when Jo Handelsman (former scientific advisor to Barack Obama) founded a course—then called “Microbes to Molecules”—at Yale University with the goal of addressing both the antibiotic crisis and the shortage of science trainees. In short order, the course grew and became a part of a larger initiative until Handelsman returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and launched Tiny Earth in collaboration with its hundreds of partners worldwide.