Karen Gibb

Karen Gibb is an environmental microbiologist with 28 years research experience. She leads the Environmental Chemistry and Microbiology Unit (ECMU) which is a research and commercial unit at Charles Darwin University that has research strengths in determining the source of contaminants and interpreting changes in marine, estuarine and aquatic environments. ECMU’s research has supported important improvements in the methodologies and policies that underpin the sustainable management of marine, estuarine and aquatic systems across northern Australia. Government now mandates some of the methodologies developed by ECMU for environmental monitoring. The core research strengths of the ECMU are: 1) the use of trace-metal and nutrient data combined with stable isotope data to determine the source of industrial and urban contaminants in tropical marine and terrestrial environments, and 2) molecular and environmental microbiology and genomics to track the sources of biological contaminants in tropical aquatic environments. Professor Gibb has published 120 journal articles over the last ten years, and in 2006 she was awarded, with two colleagues, the Northern Territory Research and Innovation Tropical Knowledge award for research