Halmos Faculty Organize Tiny Earth Conference

In December of 2020, Halmos College faculty member Aarti Raja, Ph.D., co-organized the annual Tiny Earth symposium with researchers from around the U.S. The event had 212 attendees, representing 32 academic institutions from the US and around the world. 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. Raja’s students Aysha Patel and Vijay Patel collaborated with NSU University school and presented a poster and talk along with a 11th grade USchool student Dhruv Krishna titled “Bacteria Unearthed”. Garcia mentored Chloe Barreto-Massad, a 9th grade student at the American Heritage School, in her research project entitled, “Using antiSMASH to Compare Antimicrobial Genes of Commensal E. coli (Normal Flora) to Pathogenic E. coli”, which was also presented at the symposium.

Tiny Earth was launched in 2018, however it began six years earlier when Jo Handelsman (former Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President 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.