Ludmilla Aristilde

Ludmilla Aristilde is an American engineer who is a professor at Northwestern University. Her research considers environmental biochemistry and bioengineering. She was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bessel Research Award.

Early life and education Aristilde grew up in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. She became interested in environmental science because of the environmental devastation she witnessed as a child, including deforestation and water pollution. Dirty water drove an epidemic of cholera; deforestation caused flooding and erosion. 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.

In 2021, Aristilde was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bessel Research Award. As part of the award, she worked with the University of Tübingen to explore new strategies to recover carbon from biological waste. She has demonstrated that soil bacteria (Pseudomonas putida) reorganize their metabolism to survive on lignin, which could inform the design of microbial factories to convert plant waste into sustainable fuels. The Pseudomonas putida achieve this by regulating their metabolic pathways to extract energy from lignin without exhausting itself.

Selected publications