Early life and education
Aristilde grew up in Haiti. [1] [2] She became interested in environmental science because of the environmental devastation she witnessed as a child, including deforestation and water pollution. [3] Dirty water drove an epidemic of cholera, deforestation caused flooding and erosion. [1] She studied the science of earth systems at Cornell University, where, as a keen artist, she also completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts. [3] She moved to University of California, Berkeley for her graduate studies, where she majored in environmental engineering and became interested in toxicology. She stayed in Berkeley for her doctoral research, investigating the chemodynamics of fluoroquinolone antibiotics with Garrison Sposito. [4] Fluoroquinolone antibiotics have a broad spectrum of antibacterial activity, but impact biogeochemical processes through soil bacteria. As the antibiotics strongly bond to soils, they impact their degradation and bioavailability. [4] Aristilde combined experimental and theoretical approaches to understand the environmental impacts of ciprofloxacin. [4] She was a postdoctoral researcher in Grenoble, where she held a Fulbright Program scholarship and developed spectroscopic techniques to understand interactions between organic materials and minerals. [3] She completed a National Science Foundation postdoc at Princeton University, where she learned about metabolomics and molecular biology, and joined Cornell University in 2018. [3]
Research and career
Aristilde joined Northwestern University in 2019. Her research uses molecular and computational approaches to understand the environmental and biological impacts of chemical systems. She looks to use nature's innate ability to breakdown chemicals to get rid of pollutants. [1] She has demonstrated that wastewater can breakdown plastics, and use the products for fuel. [5]
In 2021 she was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bessel Research Award. [6] As part of the award, she worked with the University of Tübingen to explore new strategies to recover carbon from biological waste. [6]
Her research looks to understand the metabolism of organic systems in environmental bacteria, the dynamics of nutrient-cycling enzymes and the physical chemistry of biomolecules. [7]
She has demonstrated that soil bacteria ( Pseudomonas putida ) reorganise their metabolism to survive on lignin, which could inform the design of microbial factories to convert plant waste into sustainable fuels. [8] The Pseudomonas putida achieve this by regulating their metabolic pathways to extract energy from lignin without exhausting itself. [9]
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