John Spear is a Professor of Environmental Microbiology and Geobiology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado USA. He has conducted more than two decades worth of research work on microbial life in extreme, interesting and unique environments.
With a focus on how microbes interact with metals, his work has centered on uranium metabolism by bacteria, subsurface microbiology and rare earth elements, how sulfur is metabolized by microbes in ice-environments and how stromatolites in Yellowstone, National Park, Wyoming, USA are lithified into rock via microbial metabolism and silica precipitation. A common theme of his work is that life has had billions of year of interaction with the Earth’s crust, that the Earth itself is one-large organism and that there is so much to learn to better understand Earth’s processes to then better humanity.
