Career
O’Malley received a USDA-NIFA postdoctoral fellowship to perform biofuel research at MIT. In 2012 she joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara as an assistant professor. O'Malley's research focuses on discovering, isolating, and characterizing cellulose-digesting fungi in the guts of herbivores. Enzymes from these fungi can be used to break down biomass (such as
grasses) into
simple sugars, which can be further
fermented into biofuels. Her research has been featured on
NPR's Science Friday, as well as in
Forbes and
Mother Jones magazines, and she has been interviewed for two
Science Career stories. == Awards ==
Selected publications
• Kevin V. Solomon, Charles H. Haitjema, John K. Henske, Sean P. Gilmore, Diego Borges-Rivera, Anna Lipzen, Heather M. Brewer, Samuel O. Purvine, Aaron T. Wright, Michael K. Theodorou, Igor V. Grigoriev, Aviv Regev, Dawn A. Thompson, Michelle A. O’Malley. "Early-branching gut fungi possess a large, comprehensive array of biomass-degrading enzymes." March 11, 2016. Science Vol. 351, Issue 6278, pp. 1192-1195 • Charles H. Haitjema, Sean P. Gilmore, John K. Henske, Kevin V. Solomon, Randall de Groot, Alan Kuo, Stephen J. Mondo, Asaf A. Salamov, Kurt LaButti, Zhiying Zhao, Jennifer Chiniquy, Kerrie Barry, Heather M. Brewer, Samuel O. Purvine, Aaron T. Wright, Matthieu Hainaut, Brigitte Boxma, Theo van Alen, Johannes H. P. Hackstein, Bernard Henrissat, Scott E. Baker, Igor V. Grigoriev & Michelle A. O'Malley. "A parts list for fungal cellulosomes revealed by comparative genomics." 30 May 2017. Nature Microbiology volume 2, Article number: 17087 • O'Malley; Michelle, Solomon; Kevin, Haitjema; Charles. "Novel Proteins from Anaerobic Fungi and Uses Thereof." U.S. Patent No. US20180362597A1 == References ==