Jill McDermott
Lehigh University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Deep on the ocean floor, seawater seeps into hot volcanic rock and returns as scalding, mineral-rich fluid at hydrothermal vents. These vents link the planet's interior with the ocean's chemistry.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
hydrothermal vents
deep sea
East Pacific Rise
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Determine how the April 2025 eruption at 9°50'N East Pacific Rise reorganized crustal permeability and fluid pathways, using high-temperature vent fluid sampling paired with in situ temperature measurements.
- Constrain post-eruption phase separation, redox conditions and volatile budgets, and link them to permeability changes using geothermobarometric (temperature-pressure) and isotopic data compared against a 2018–2025 time series.
- Measure rates of nitrogen loss, recycling and microbial uptake at Endeavour hydrothermal vents using 15N-labeled tracer incubations run in parallel at atmospheric and deep-sea pressures.
- Test whether gradual redox gradients within vent animal assemblages favor nitrification and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium compared with fluids from bare rock.
- Identify the microbial taxa carrying out each nitrogen-cycling pathway using molecular genetic data from environmental samples and tracer incubations.
More about the research
They also support dense communities of microbes and animals. This research asks how vents change after volcanic eruptions and how vent ecosystems affect the ocean's supply of nitrogen, a nutrient all life needs. Both projects rely on sampling fluids directly at deep-sea vents.
Why it matters
Understanding how submarine eruptions reshape vent systems could help scientists predict mid-ocean ridge eruptions and their effects on the ocean. Measuring vent nitrogen cycling at true deep-sea pressures could correct inaccurate estimates of how hydrothermal vents add to or remove nitrogen from the deep ocean, a nutrient that shapes ocean productivity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Nitrogen cycling under pressure: Measuring N-loss and N-recycling across redox gradients at deep-sea hydrothermal vents
NSF · Sep 2024 – Aug 2027
Collaborative Research: RAPID: Study of the April 2025 Eruption at 9 50 N EPR: Fluid Pathways, Crustal Permeability, and Plume Evolution
NSF · Dec 2025 – Nov 2026
Closest labs
Jason Sylvan
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Identify the active microbes recolonizing the 2025 East Pacific Rise eruption site, using amplicon sequencing, metatranscriptomics (gene activity) and proteomics alongside measurements of primary productivity and fluid chemistry.
George Lazar
California State University-San Bernardino, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how the rare methane isotopologues 13CH3D and 12CH2D2 are distributed when organic matter decomposes under hydrothermal conditions, using lab experiments analyzed on the Panorama high-resolution mass spectrometer.
John Paul Balmonte
Lehigh University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Compare how depressurization changes the activity of extracellular enzymes produced by deep-ocean microbial communities, using pressurization systems at sea and in the lab.
The school
Lehigh University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $62M a year on research, 99 research doctorates a year.
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