Bio/Description
Xinning Zhang is an assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton University and a member of Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute. She is an environmental microbiologist whose research includes geochemistry, microbiology and biogeochemistry. Her research aims to understand how microbial metabolism influences biogeochemical cycling and climate in modern and ancient environments. Recently, she has been studying the controls on biological nitrogen fixation, nature’s method to obtain new nutrient nitrogen for ecosystems, and the role that wetlands play in generating methane, a significant greenhouse gas.