Margaret Weng

Bio

Maggie Weng is a NASA postdoctoral fellow in the Dekas lab at Stanford University. Her research focuses on understanding molybdenum availability and uptake strategies at deep-sea methane seeps. She uses culture-independent techniques including metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and stable isotope probing to understand whole-community dynamics. She earned her PhD from Georgetown University in 2024 with Dr. Sarah Stewart Johnson, where her research focused on microbes in hypersaline environments, and her bachelor's degree in 2019 from Washington University in St. Louis. She is interested in microbial persistence at the edge of possibility, including extreme environments and polluted sites, and how microbial communities contribute to bioremediation and ecosystem stability. She always says yes to fieldwork and as a consequence has found herself in the Atacama Desert, Kerlingarfjöll, Iceland, and Western Australia as well as a commercial salt factory in San Diego, CA. When not in the lab she is an avid writer, hiker and knitter. Her fiction and nonfiction writing have appeared in The Los Angeles Review and Northern Woodlands magazine. When out in the woods, she appreciates a good biofilm almost as much as a good view.

Honors & Awards

• NSF Graduate Research Fellow, National Science Foundation (2019-2024)
• NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow, NASA (2025)

Stanford Advisors

• Anne Dekas, Postdoctoral Faculty Sponsor