Congratulations to Dr. Sean Crowe, who has been selected as a recipient of the 2026 UBC Killam Faculty Research Prize in the Sciences and Applied Sciences category.   

Established in 1986, the Killam Research Prizes are supported by an endowment created through a bequest from the late Dorothy J. Killam and are awarded annually to ten outstanding researchers at UBC. The Killam Research Prizes are among the university’s most distinguished honors, celebrating faculty across various disciplines who have demonstrated exceptional research excellence, significant scholarly impacts in their fields, and national and/or international research leadership.    

Dr. Crowe is a Canada Research Chair in Geomicrobiology and a Professor in the Departments of Earth, Ocean, & Atmospheric Sciences and Microbiology & Immunology at UBC. His work focuses on developing conceptual and numerical models of biogeochemical cycling and the coupled evolution of Earth surface chemistry and life. His interdisciplinary research spans multiple scales of space and time, from mineral-microbe interactions to global processes, and from the Precambrian through to the Anthropocene.   

At the Crowe lab, researchers investigate microbiological and geochemical processes in natural and engineered environments to find new solutions for problems in the energy, resource, and health sectors. Their work explores a wide range of questions, including: 1) how did the Earth come to support complex animal life and humans; 2) how will biogeochemical cycles respond to the emergence of humans as geobiological agents; and 3) how can we harness the ingenuity of microbial communities to mitigate pain-points arising from increased human demands on water, energy, mineral, and agricultural resources.