Person - Professor Caroline (Carrie) Harwood

Short Biography

Caroline (Carrie) Harwood received her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Massachusetts and completed postdoctoral work at Yale University. She held academic appointments at Cornell University and the University of Iowa before moving to the University of Washington in 2005. Dr. Harwood is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology. She received the Procter & Gamble Award in Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 2010.

Current Research

In Carrie's laboratory, her team is interested in understanding how bacteria integrate diverse environmental signals and diverse metabolic modules to function at the whole cell level. We rely heavily on genome sequencing, mutant construction and analysis and transcriptome analysis for our work.

We are currently working with scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to gain a fundamental understanding of factors governing the persistence of naturally occurring and engineered microbes in plant rhizosphere environments. We are looking at native sorghum rhizosphere microbes and will try to control their niche using genome reduction and engineered addiction to plant root exudates.

UW Project Website: Bacterial Persistence Control in Soils at UW