Dr. Santoro received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in Environmental Engineering. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she was a faculty member at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science before joining the faculty at UCSB. She is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Early Career Fellowship, a Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator Award in Marine Microbial Ecology, and the Simons Foundation Investigator in Aquatic Microbial Ecology award. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO).
The Santoro lab studies bacteria and archaea that cycle Nitrogen and other nutrients in the ocean, coastal sediments, and soils, experimenting with these organisms in the lab, looking for their DNA in the environment, and measuring rates of the different chemical reactions they perform. The goal is to understand how and when these organisms evolved, how they collaborate with other organisms, and how they keep our ocean clean.