Building tiny tools to understand Earth’s biggest habitat
Halleh Balch develops nanoscale environmental sensors to probe the molecular mechanisms that underlie ocean-climate interactions and explore paths to improve water security and sustainability.
As told to Beth Jensen
The oceans are the largest habitat on the planet, but a lot of that habitat is extremely hard to study. Similar to how we study other planets in our solar system, we need to make smaller and mobile versions of the sophisticated instruments we have developed for the research laboratory and then send them into this remote and harsh environment.
My research group studies new ways to control light-matter interactions at the nanoscale to address these measurement challenges. We then use these tools to ask fundamental scientific questions, focusing specifically on oceanography and water sustainability.
I collaborate with marine scientists and oceanographers to bring the new instruments we develop into the field on buoys, floats, and autonomous platforms, so we can unlock measurements that have never been possible before.
Questions that we are currently interested in include how to study the biodiversity of an ecosystem using molecular markers including environmental DNA, and how we can quantitatively measure and understand the production of small-molecule metabolites like toxins, signaling compounds, and climate-relevant gases produced by marine microbes across diverse oceanographic contexts.
Being able to measure these molecular markers, developing new modes of underwater imaging and spectroscopy, and integrating adaptive intelligence into these measurements and their analyses could help us understand the molecular basis of microbial response to environmental change, enable rapid detection of emerging contaminants, and identify pathways to adaptive forecasting.
I was originally drawn to experimental physics because it combines creativity, technical detail, and hands-on work. It allows us to ask questions about how the universe works. We can learn how to measure a parameter, or if we lack the appropriate tool, invent one.
I’m excited to join the Oceans department and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which has a real commitment to interdisciplinary work in both research and education. Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station on the edge of Monterey Bay is also an amazing place and makes it possible to connect the work we do directly to the lab and the oceanographic context.
I enjoy that my work draws on many different ways of thinking – from solving calculations and teaching students to designing and building our instruments. I love that there is great intellectual range every day.
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