The work of Terry Hazen, Governor’s Chair for Environmental Biotechnology, as featured in a Chemical and Engineering News article about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. His research has found that the spill dramatically altered the microbial population structure in the waters. He and colleagues detected 951 bacterial subfamilies in uncontaminated Gulf of Mexico water. In the plume, however, they found that the water was highly enriched in 16 hydrocarbon-digesting subfamilies.