Zoe Cardon

Senior Scientist

Zoe Cardon
Contact Information
Education
Ph.D., Biological Sciences, Stanford University, 1994
B.S. Biology, B.A. Spanish, Utah State University, 1988
MBL Affiliation
Ecosystems Center
Research Area
Ecosystems
Global Change
Imaging
Microbiomes
Lab Website

Zoe Cardon is a Senior Scientist in The Ecosystems Center at the MBL. As an ecosystems ecologist with roots in mechanistic plant physiology, she explores how plants contribute to ecosystem function both above- and belowground, particularly in partnership with microbes and soils in the “rhizosphere.” Dr. Cardon received her PhD from Stanford University, was a DOE Global Change Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, and after a short stint as Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, she became Assistant then Associate Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Dept. at University of Connecticut. At UConn, she was a founding member, Associate Director, and Graduate Program Director of the interdisciplinary, cross-departmental Center for Integrative Geosciences. In 2002-2003, she was named Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Fellow in Conservation Biology at Harvard. Cardon’s work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, and since arriving at MBL in 2008, she contributed to the launch of the National Microbiome Initiative by the White House OSTP, served as an elected member of the Governing Board of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), and she was named a Fellow of ESA in 2018 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021. 

Links:

News and Research Highlights
Zoe Cardon works with
Anne Giblin Headshot
Anne Giblin
Senior Scientist and Director, The Ecosystems Center
Ecosystems Center
Emil Ruff
Emil Ruff
Associate Scientist
Ecosystems Center
Keiluweit
Marco Keiluweit
Assistant Professor
UMass Amherst
Malmstrom
Professor
Michigan State University
Bezanilla
Professor
Dartmouth College
William Riley
Senior Scientist
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Teri O'Meara
R&D Associate Staff Scientist
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Benjamin Sulman
R&D Associate Staff Scientist
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
no headshot
Director, Advanced Electron Microscopy Facility
University of Chicago
Selected Publications

Garcia Arredondo M,  Kew W, Chu R, Jones M, Boiteau R, Cardon ZG, Keiluweit M (2024). Differential exudation creates biogeochemically distinct microenvironments during rhizosphere evolution. Environmental Science and Technology.58:18713−18722.

Zhou Y, O’Meara T, Cardon ZG, Wang J, Sulman BN, Giblin A, Forbrich I. (2024) Simulated plant-mediated oxygen input has strong impacts on fine-scale porewater biogeochemistry and weak impacts on integrated methane fluxes in coastal wetlands. Dzdz𳾾ٰ

Sulman BN, Wang J, LaFond-Hudon S, O'Meara T, Yuan F, Molins S, Hammond G, Forbrich I, Cardon ZG, Giblin AE. (2024) Integrating tide-driven wetland soil redox and biogeochemical interactions into a land surface model. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 16, e2023MS004002. 

Pérez Castro S, Peredo EL, Mason O, Vineis J, Bowen J, Mortazavi B, Ganesh A, Ruff SE, Paul B, Giblin AE, Cardon ZG (2023) Diversity from single nucleotide variant to metagenome scales among sulfur cycling bacteria in Massachusetts and Alabama salt marsh. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 89(11):10.1128/aem.00988-23

Li H, Bölscher T, Winnick M, Tfaily MM, Cardon ZG, and Keiluweit M. (2021) Simple plant and microbial metabolites destabilize mineral-associated organic matter via multiple pathways.  Environmental Science and Technology 55(5): 3389–3398 doi: 10.1021/acs.est.0c04592

Peredo EL and Cardon ZG (2020) Shared up-regulation and contrasting down-regulation of gene expression distinguish desiccation-tolerant from intolerant green algae. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 117 (29) 17438-17445. doi:10.1073/pnas.1906904117

Cardon ZG, Peredo EL, Dohnalkova AC, Gershone HL, Bezanilla M. (2018) A model suite of green algae within the Scenedesmaceae for investigating contrasting desiccation tolerance and morphology. Journal of Cell Science 131: jcs212233 doi: 10.1242/jcs.212233 (Cover image, and paper included in the “Research Highlights” section of issue 131.)

Cardon ZG, Stark JM, Herron PM, Rasmussen JA. (2013) Sagebrush carrying out hydraulic lift enhances surface soil nitrogen cycling and nitrogen uptake into inflorescences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 110(47):18988-18993. 10.1073/pnas.1311314110

Cardon,Z.G. and Gage, D.J. (2006) Resource exchange in the rhizosphere – molecular tools and the microbial perspective. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 37: 459-88. doi: 10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.37.091305.110207