Jillian Banfield

Jillian Fiona Banfield (born 18 August 1959) is professor at the University of California, Berkeley with appointments in the Earth Science, Ecosystem Science and Materials Science and Engineering departments. She is the director of microbiology at the Innovative Genomics Institute, is affiliated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has a position at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Some of her most noted work includes publications on the structure and functioning of microbial communities and the nature, properties and reactivity (especially crystal growth) of nanomaterials.

Early life and education

Banfield was educated at the Australian National University where she completed her bachelor's and master's degrees (1978–1985) both examining granite weathering. She attributes her initial interest in geomicrobiology to Dr Tony Eggleton who drew her attention to processes at the earth's surface, mineral weathering and the regolith.

Banfield graduated with a PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Johns Hopkins University for high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) studies of metamorphic reactions supervised by David R. Veblen.

Career and research

Banfield is an earth scientist who studies the structure, functioning and diversity of microbial communities in natural environments and the human microbiome.

Banfield was a Fulbright Student in Medicine from the Australian National University to Johns Hopkins University in 1988, and a Mac Arthur Fellow in 1999. She has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1990 to 2001 and the University of Tokyo (1996–1998).

Since 2001, she has been a researcher and professor at the University of California Berkeley where she heads the geomicrobiology program and works as a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.