Faculty Spotlight: Mark McDonald

Mark McDonald, PhD joined the School of Geosciences as an assistant professor in August 2024. Mark is a soil microbial ecologist and biochemist who is interested in the complex interactions between soil microorganisms, the soil environment, plants growth, and ecosystem outputs such as greenhouse gas production. Growing up in rural East Tennessee, Mark was surrounded by fields where these interactions were taking place, but it wasn’t until after his undergraduate in microbiology at The University of Tennessee that he had the opportunity to conduct soil and agriculturally based research during his Masters at Texas Tech University and his PhD at Texas A&M University. After five years in the arid cotton fields of Texas, Mark joined the Terrestrial Biogeochemistry group at Argonne National Laboratory for his postdoc where he investigated the impact of climate change on permafrost degradation. Prior to moving to Lafayette, Mark joined the University of New Hampshire as a staff scientist where he helped lead the development of a global database of studies that focus on the diverse changes in microbial community structure and function following permafrost thaw.

Mark is planning to build his research program around his diverse experiences in natural and managed soil systems and investigations into the direct changes that occur following environmental disturbances. He hopes to focus on areas such as permafrost thaw, agricultural management change, and to expand his horizons to include the climate-change driven effects on the coastal wetlands of southern Louisiana. Mark describes his research area as “Microbially Informed Biogeochemistry” where he aims to combine the detailed assessment of microbial communities with fundamental information about soil nutrients, carbon, chemistry, and structure.

Contact Dr. McDonald or learn more through these links:
mark.mcdonald@louisiana.edu
Mark McDonald's website
Mark McDonald's Google Scholar page
Mark McDonald's ResearchGate page