Dr Pok Man Leung
Affiliation with Antarctic Science Foundation
“Traversing The Covid Gap” Grant Recipient 2022
PhD Thesis
Energetic basis of microbial growth and persistence in global desert ecosystems
More about Pok Man
I am a postdoctoral researcher and environmental microbiology team leader within Greening Lab at Monash University. With an environmental science background developed during my undergraduate years, I advanced as a microbial ecologist during PhD. My research passion is to study how diverse microorganisms can survive, interact, and in turn, modulate their hosts and environments. To holistically understand these complex ecological dynamics and physiology of microbial communities, I apply skills across multiple disciplines, including ecology (e.g. ecological theory and sampling methods), evolution (e.g. phylogenetics, Bayesian divergence modelling), biogeochemistry (e.g. gas chromatography, radioisotope tracing, respirometry, thermodynamics), microbiology (e.g. microbial isolation and cultivation), molecular biology (e.g. DNA extraction, PCR), and bioinformatics (e.g. amplicon sequence analysis, genome-resolved metagenomics). This has led to new findings, including the discovery of methane-oxidizing bacteria living on tree trunks that actively mitigate stem methane emission and the finding that abundant microbes survive in nutrient and water-limited soils in continental Antarctica through the widespread ability to utilise allochthonous energy sources.
Selected Publications
Nature Microbiology: Molecular hydrogen in seawater supports growth of diverse marine bacteria
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01322-
The ISME Journal: Atmospheric chemosynthesis is phylogenetically and geographically widespread and contributes significantly to carbon fixation throughout cold deserts
