Sallie W. Chisholm facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Sallie Watson Chisholm
Born	1947 (age 77–78) Marquette, Michigan, U.S.
Alma mater	Skidmore College University at Albany, SUNY
Known for	Study of phytoplankton, especially Prochlorococcus
Awards	National Medal of Science Alexander Agassiz Medal (2010) Crafoord Prize (2019)
Scientific career
Fields	Marine biology
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sallie Watson "Penny" Chisholm (born 1947) is an American scientist who studies the ocean. She works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Chisholm is an expert in tiny ocean life, like bacteria and algae. Her most famous discovery is a tiny ocean plant called Prochlorococcus. She found it in the 1980s with her team. This plant is super important! She even gave a TED talk about how this tiny creature helps power our planet.

Early Life and Education

Sallie Chisholm was born in Marquette, Michigan. She finished high school there in 1965. She then went to Skidmore College. Later, she earned her PhD degree from University at Albany, SUNY in 1974. After that, she did more research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for two years.

Discoveries and Career

Since 1976, Dr. Chisholm has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also been a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since 1978. Her work has focused on how tiny ocean plants, called phytoplankton, live and grow.

Early in her career, Dr. Chisholm studied how these tiny plants get their food. She also looked at how this affects their daily lives. This led her to use a special tool called flow cytometry. This tool can measure the features of individual cells.

Using flow cytometry, Dr. Chisholm and her team made a big discovery. They found that very small ocean plants, like Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus, produce much more food than scientists thought. Before, people believed that larger plants called diatoms were the most important. They thought diatoms produced about 10–20 billion tons of carbon each year. Dr. Chisholm's work showed that these tiny algae cycle even more carbon. They also play a key role in how nitrogen moves through the ocean.

In recent years, Dr. Chisholm has spoken out against using "iron fertilization" to fix climate change. This idea involves adding iron to the ocean to make more algae grow. She believes this might not be a good solution.

In 1994, Dr. Chisholm was one of 16 women professors at MIT. They wrote a letter to the Dean of Science. This letter helped start a campaign to fight against unfair treatment of women at MIT.

Awards and Honors

Dr. Chisholm has received many awards for her important work. She became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2003. She also became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992.

In 2010, she won the Alexander Agassiz Medal. This award was for her "pioneering studies" of the main plants in the sea. It also recognized how she helped us understand the global ocean better.

In 2013, President Barack Obama gave her the National Medal of Science. This is one of the highest honors for scientists in the United States.

She also received the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology in 2013. This was for being a very productive and active researcher in ocean biology.

In 2019, she received the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences. This prize is often seen as being like the Nobel Prize for biology. She won it for discovering and studying Prochlorococcus. This tiny plant is the most common plant that makes its own food on Earth.

See also

In Spanish: Sallie W. Chisholm para niños

• Prochlorococcus
• Synechococcus
• Carbon cycle
• Global warming