Rika Anderson

Rika Anderson is an Assistant Professor at Carleton College, where she investigates microbial ecology and evolution in extreme environments. Her research integrates environmental microbiology, marine biology, and planetary science to explore deep-sea hydrothermal vent microbial and viral communities, including their roles in biogeochemical cycling and food web dynamics. Recent work examines serpentinization as a source of phosphite to vent microbes, the deep evolutionary origins of biological molybdenum usage, and microbial exoenzymes’ role in Earth’s oxygenation. She leads an NSF CAREER project on temporal dynamics of microbial and viral function in hydrothermal vents and co-authored a Nature Microbiology roadmap for equitable reuse of public microbiome data.