Roland Hatzenpichler

A first generation college student, Roland earned his M.Sc. (2006) and Ph.D. (2011) in microbial ecology in the lab of Michael Wagner at the University of Vienna (Austria), where the worked on thermophilic ammonia-oxidizing archaea. From 2011-2016, he was a postdoc with Victoria Orphan at Caltech, where he worked on anaerobic methanotrophic archaea living in a syntrophic relationship with sulfate-reducing bacteria. In Nov. 2016 he joined Montana State's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry as Assistant Professor. He received tenure in May 2023. Since 2024, he is the Associate Director of Montana State's Thermal Biology Institute, the In 2017, he was named a NASA Early Career Fellow. He is a member of the Steering Committee of NASA's Network for Life Detection (NFold) and the User Executive Committee of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute. He is an editorial board member of the journal Environmental Microbiology.

February 2025