Rate My Professor Estelle Couradeau

Estelle Couradeau is an Assistant Professor of Soils and Environmental Microbiology in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Penn State University, joining the faculty in early 2020. She earned her Ph.D. in geomicrobiology from the University of Paris-Diderot in France, focusing on the interactions between microbes and mineral substrates. Prior to her appointment at Penn State, Couradeau served as a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, studying arid land soils formed by microbial communities, and at the Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she investigated contaminated soils and developed proficiency in microbiome characterization using omics techniques.

Her research program at Penn State utilizes environmental omics and imaging methods to connect in-situ microbial physiology to ecosystem-level properties, with emphasis on identifying active microbes, their metabolic responses to environmental changes like climate shifts, and roles in biogeochemical cycles. The lab particularly examines biological soil crusts, which cover 12% of Earth's continental surface and are dominated by cyanobacteria, as well as rhizosphere microbiomes in agricultural systems. Couradeau holds affiliations with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences as a co-hire with the College of Agricultural Sciences, the Plant Institute, One Health Microbiome Center, Institute of Energy and the Environment, and Astrobiology Research Center. Key publications include "Probing the active fraction of soil microbiomes using BONCAT-FACS" (Nature Communications, 2019), "Spatial segregation of the biological soil crust microbiome around its foundational cyanobacterium, Microcoleus vaginatus, and the formation of a nitrogen-fixing cyanosphere" (Microbiome, 2019), "Biological Soil Crusts as Modern Analogs for the Archean Continental Biosphere: Insights from Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes" (Astrobiology, 2020), "Incorporating microbiomes into the One Health Joint Plan of Action" (mBio, 2025), and "Tailocin tail fiber diversity correlates with rfbD variation in the Pseudomonas syringae species complex" (ISME Communications, 2025).