Jianqiu Zheng

Biography

Research and Duties After Graduation

Jianqiu will be joining the Biosciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a member of the Microbial Ecology and Physiology group headed by Dr. David E. Graham. She will be part of the biogeochemistry team that is working on the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments project (NGEE Arctic). A goal of NGEE Arctic is to reduce uncertainties in estimates of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions from high-latitude ecosystems by advancing understanding of the environmental drivers of biogeochemical processes across molecular to landscape scales.

Research While at Michigan Tech

Jianqiu’s thesis research focused on developing an enzyme-explicit model of the biological regulation of denitrification to improve predictions of nitrous oxide (N₂O) accumulations in soil and emissions from the surface. Cultivated soils are a globally important source of N₂O, which is a long-lived greenhouse gas and the principal biogenic source of stratospheric N₂O that contributes to destruction of the ozone layer. Sections of soil cores were incubated in the laboratory and used to develop a metabolic model of denitrification and a rainfall simulation study was performed to examine the kinetics of denitrification in a soybean field. Incorporating explicit representations of denitrification enzyme kinetics into a soil gas diffusion model accurately simulated production and reduction of N₂O in the cultivated soil and emissions of N₂O from the surface following a rainfall event.