Jennifer Bowen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Professor Bowen focuses on biogeochemical cycling, coastal wetlands, ecosystems ecology, and microbial ecology.
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Biography
My work runs the gamut from understanding how human derived nutrients are altering the structure and function of salt marshes to examining whether oyster aquaculture increases the prevalence of both beneficial and harmful microorganisms in the environment. At the broadest levels, I am interested in how human activities are altering the structure and function of microbial communities and in turn how microbial communities can help ameliorate pollution from human sources.
The Boston area provides a great location for understanding how urban ecosystems influence biogeochemical cycling and the microbes that are responsible for those processes. Currently funded projects in my lab include 1) a long-term nutrient enrichment experiment at the Plum Island Long-Term Ecological Research site in Northern Massachusetts that aims to understand how coastal eutrophication will affect the sustainability of salt marsh ecosystems, and 2) Understanding how marsh restorations, including the Rumney Marsh, in Revere, MA, alter the capacity of marshes to remove land-derived nitrogen. We also have new projects that we are starting examining different aspects of plant – microbe and animal – microbe interactions, including how the invasive reed Phragmites australis alters microbial community structure compared to native lineages and how antibiotic treatment affects the microbiome of the Kemps Ridley sea turtle using a variety of cutting edge tools from molecular biology and biogeochemistry.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Microbial Ecology
Coastal Wetlands
Microbial Communities
Biogeochemical Cycling
Ecosystems Ecology
Education (2)
Boston University Marine Program: Ph.D., Biology 2005
Colby College: B.A., Biology 1994
Links (3)
Media Appearances (4)
Why do invasive species do so well?
Scientific Journal for Kids
2018-01-01
Did you know that several different kinds of microbes live in our bodies, and that they perform lots of important functions? For example, they can help us fight harmful infections and help us to get all the goodness out of the food we eat. Plants also have special relationships with microbes, particularly those that live around their roots. These microbes can help the plant to fight disease and are important to make
Blood is thicker than water for the common reed -- At least that's what the soil tells us
Science Daily
2017-09-05
In a paper published in Nature Communications, Northeastern University Professor Jennifer Bowen and University of Rhode Island Professor Laura Meyerson reveal that a native type of the common reed (Phragmites australis) has more in common with other native populations of the plant growing elsewhere across the country than they have in common with invasive types occupying the same ecosystem. The results from their study will aid in understanding how plant invasions succeed and the conditions necessary for their success...
Invasive plants change ecosystems from the bottom up
Science Daily
2017-09-05
Now Meyerson, a professor of natural resources sciences, and Northeastern University Professor Jennifer Bowen have revealed that even when two different lineages grow side-by-side in the same ecosystem, the bacterial communities in the soil differ dramatically. It's a discovery that will aid in understanding how plant invasions succeed and the conditions necessary for their success...
DOE denies it has policy to remove ‘climate change’ from agency materials
Science Magazine
2017-08-25
Jennifer Bowen, an associate professor at Northeastern University in Boston, posted a letter on Facebook showing a DOE official asking her to remove the words "global warming" and "climate change" from her research proposal on nutrient loading in salt marsh carbon sequestration. The DOE official, whose name is not shown, allegedly said the department wants the language scrapped to "meet the President's budget language restrictions." "This just happened," Bowen wrote yesterday in a post alongside the letter. "I'm just going to leave that here for people to ponder."...
Articles (5)
Effects of mercury addition on microbial community composition and nitrate removal inside permeable reactive barriers
Environemental Pollution
Kenly Hiller-Bittrolff, Kenneth Foreman, Ashley N Bulseco-McKim, Janina Benoit, Jennifer L Bowen
2018 Permeable reactive barriers (PRBs) remove nitrogen from groundwater by enhancing microbial denitrification. The PRBs consist of woodchips that provide carbon for denitrifiers, but these woodchips also support other anaerobic microbes, including sulfate-reducing bacteria. Some of these anaerobes have the ability to methylate inorganic mercury present in groundwater. Methylmercury is hazardous to human health, so it is essential to understand whether PRBs promote mercury methylation...
The Influence of Oyster Farming on Sediment Bacterial Communities
Estuaries and Coasts
Sarah G Feinman, Yuna R Farah, Jonathan M Bauer, Jennifer L Bowen
2018 Aquaculture currently provides half of all fish for human consumption, and this proportion is expected to increase to meet the growing global demand for protein. As aquaculture, including oyster farming, expands, it is increasingly important to understand effects on coastal ecosystems. The broad-scale ecological effects of oyster aquaculture are well documented; however, less is known regarding the influence of oyster aquaculture on sediment bacterial communities...
The Toxicogenome of Hyalella azteca: A Model for Sediment Ecotoxicology and Evolutionary Toxicology
Environmental Science & Technology
Helen C Poynton, Simone Hasenbein, Joshua B Benoit, Maria S Sepulveda, Monica F Poelchau, Daniel ST Hughes, Shwetha C Murali, Shuai Chen, Karl M Glastad, Michael AD Goodisman, John H Werren, Joseph H Vineis, Jennifer L Bowen, Markus Friedrich, Jeffery Jones, Hugh M Robertson, René Feyereisen, Alexandra Mechler-Hickson, Nicholas Mathers, Carol Eunmi Lee, John K Colbourne, Adam Biales, J Spencer Johnston, Gary A Wellborn, Andrew J Rosendale, Andrew G Cridge, Monica C Munoz-Torres, Peter A Bain, Austin R Manny, Kaley M Major, Faith N Lambert, Chris D Vulpe, Padrig Tuck, Bonnie J Blalock, Yu-Yu Lin, Mark E Smith, Hugo Ochoa-Acuña, Mei-Ju May Chen, Christopher P Childers, Jiaxin Qu, Shannon Dugan, Sandra L Lee, Hsu Chao, Huyen Dinh, Yi Han, HarshaVardhan Doddapaneni, Kim C Worley, Donna M Muzny, Richard A Gibbs, Stephen Richards
2018 Hyalella azteca is a cryptic species complex of epibenthic amphipods of interest to ecotoxicology and evolutionary biology. It is the primary crustacean used in North America for sediment toxicity testing and an emerging model for molecular ecotoxicology. To provide molecular resources for sediment quality assessments and evolutionary studies, we sequenced, assembled, and annotated the genome of the H...
Long-term nutrient addition differentially alters community composition and diversity of genes that control nitrous oxide flux from salt marsh sediments
Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science
Patrick J Kearns, John H Angell, Sarah G Feinman, Jennifer L Bowen
2015 Enrichment of natural waters, soils, and sediments by inorganic nutrients, including nitrogen, is occurring at an increasing rate and has fundamentally altered global biogeochemical cycles. Salt marshes are critical for the removal of land-derived nitrogen before it enters coastal waters. This is accomplished via multiple microbially mediated pathways, including denitrification. Many of these pathways, however, are also a source of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N 2 O). We used clone libraries and quantative PCR (qPCR) to examine the effect of fertilization on the diversity and abundance of two functional genes associated with denitrification and N 2 O production (norB and nosZ) in experimental plots at the Great Sippewissett Salt Marsh (Falmouth, MA, USA) that have been enriched with nutrients for over 40 years. Our data showed distinct nosZ and norB community structures at different …
Connecting the dots: linking nitrogen cycle gene expression to nitrogen fluxes in marine sediment mesocosms
Frontiers in Microbiology
Jennifer L Bowen, Andrew R Babbin, Patrick J Kearns, Bess B Ward
2014 Connecting molecular information directly to microbial transformation rates remains a challenge, despite the availability of molecular methods to investigate microbial biogeochemistry. By combining information on gene abundance and expression for key genes with quantitative modeling of nitrogen fluxes, we can begin to understand the scales on which genetic signals vary and how they relate to key functions. We used quantitative PCR of DNA and cDNA, along with biogeochemical modeling to assess how the abundance and expression of microbes responsible for two steps in the nitrogen cycle changed over time in estuarine sediment mesocosms. Sediments and water were collected from coastal Massachusetts and maintained in replicated 20 L mesocosms for 45 days. Concentrations of all major inorganic nitrogen species were measured daily and used to derive rates of …
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