Many Montana State University students arrive in Bozeman — at its roughly 5,000 feet above sea level — and only climb from there, ascending southwest Montana’s many peaks. But a team from MSU’s College of Letters and Science descended nearly 17,000 feet below MSU’s elevation, traveling to some of the deepest areas of the sea on a recent research cruise. Postdoctoral researcher Andrew Montgomery and doctoral student Sylvia Nupp are part of associate professor Roland Hatzenpichler’s multidisciplinary lab in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
This spring, Montgomery and Nupp traveled to the Guaymas Basin off the west coast of Mexico for a monthlong research cruise that made Nupp the first student from Montana to descend to the deep sea, according to Hatzenpichler. It was a trip that Nupp had been preparing for since she arrived at MSU in 2021, after completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Arkansas. “This happened to be the project that he had funding for at the time, so he asked if I would be interested in deep-sea research, and I said absolutely,” she recalled.
Hatzenpichler’s lab conducts a breadth of microbial research, from work exploring the human gut microbiome to examining the microbes that live in extreme environments, such as Yellowstone National Park’s thermal features. Nupp and Montgomery’s work on the ocean floor fell into the latter category, and the Guaymas Basin is an ideal location for such work. “Scientists ha.
