Pilar

Vergeli

Pilar Vergeli is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Zakem lab at Carnegie Science. She earned her PhD in Geological Sciences from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. Her research integrates biogeochemistry, microbial ecology, and complex systems science to investigate how element use is organized across biological and ecological scales. During her PhD, she developed a framework combining meta-omics, ecological stoichiometry, and cheminformatics to reveal universal patterns in elemental composition and enzymatic function across diverse ecosystems. She also conducted photochemical experiments to explore how abiotic, light-driven reactions may have shaped early elemental cycling, offering insight into a possible non-biological mechanism contributing to Archean banded iron formation deposition. At Carnegie, her work focuses on developing quantitative models to understand how elemental constraints, particularly at the scale of individual organisms, influence large-scale biogeochemical processes. Her research contributes to microbial and ecosystem ecology by advancing an ecological understanding of elemental interactions within communities, with broader implications for identifying universal features of life in astrobiology.