Rate My Professor Kriti Sharma

Kriti Sharma serves as Associate Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies within the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department in the Humanities Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a microbial ecologist and philosopher, Sharma's scholarship bridges biology, philosophy, and art, re-telling the narrative of life not through lenses of struggle and scarcity, but as one of radical interdependence. She holds a PhD in Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and conducted postdoctoral research in geobiology at the California Institute of Technology. Her career reflects a commitment to integrating empirical science with critical humanities perspectives, including previous work at Caltech.

Sharma's research centers on field- and laboratory investigations of microbes inhabiting deep-sea sediments in seagrass meadows. This work elucidates the role of these carbon-sequestering microorganisms in mitigating climate change and draws lessons for societal transitions into uncertain futures beyond prevailing bio-economic visions of life and the human. Housed in the Earth and Marine Sciences Building, her transdisciplinary laboratory convenes multispecies collectives to explore these themes. She maintains close ties with the Science & Justice Research Center, contributing to the development of a new Science & Justice undergraduate minor that promotes transdisciplinary initiatives across campus. A prolific author, Sharma penned Interdependence: Biology and Beyond, published by Fordham University Press in 2015, and co-authored Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human with Michal Osterweil and Arturo Escobar, released by Bloomsbury UK in 2024. Her peer-reviewed publications include "Transparent soil microcosms for live-cell imaging and non-destructive stable isotope probing of soil microorganisms" in eLife (2020), "The RosR transcription factor is required for gene expression dynamics in response to extreme oxidative stress in a hypersaline-adapted archaeon" in BMC Genomics (2012), and "Two transcription factors are necessary for iron homeostasis in a salt-dwelling archaeon" in Nucleic Acids Research (2011). These contributions advance microbial ecology and philosophy of biology.