Caroline S. Harwood

Caroline Harwood is Professor Gerald and Lyn Grinstein Professor of Microbiology and Associate Vice-Provost for Research at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Her research topics are metabolic networks, bacterial signaling, and bioenergy production. The focus of her laboratory is understanding how bacteria integrate diverse environmental signals and diverse metabolic modules to function at the whole cell level. The lab relies on genome sequencing, mutant construction and analysis and transcriptome analysis for its work.

Harwood specializes in studies of bacteria that thrive on light and can produce hydrogen gas, a biofuel. These and other kinds of bacteria can stay alive without growing from exceptionally long periods of time, and this allows them to devote all their resources to making valuable products like hydrogen gas. This condition of non-growth has not been studied much in bacteria and Harwood is focused on finding genes and functions important for bacterial longevity.

Harwood received her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Massachusetts and completed postdoctoral work at Yale University. She held academic appointments at Cornell University and the University of Iowa before moving to the University of Washington in 2005.