Pamela Weisenhorn was born in the heat of the summer in Metairie, LA to Mark and Dana Weisenhorn. Her parents’ then neighbors, Kent and Karen Mahe, and their son Kevin met Pamela almost as soon as her own sister, Lisa, did and they are still like family to her. It wasn’t for another couple of years that her brother-by-the-same-mother, Jeff, came into the picture. The Weisenhorn family moved to Shreveport, LA on Pamela’s third birthday. (Pamela doesn’t actually have any memory of this, but still holds a grudge because she can.) They moved to Houston, TX a short year and a half later.

Pamela attended Terrace Elementary and then Northbrook Middle School where she met Timmie Bui and introduced her to King Cake. She started high school at Northbrook High School where she was on the debate team and volunteered after school and during the summer through the local Communities In Schools program. After applying her tried and true method of life planning, aka coin flipping, Pamela left Northbrook after her sophomore year to attend the Texas Academy of Math and Sciences in Denton, TX.

The summer after TAMS, Pamela worked as a contractor for the Army Corps in Lewisville, TX and her parents are still receiving junk mail to this day! Pamela completed her B.S. at Louisiana State University with her brother-from-her-other-mother Kevin. While there, she did field research in many of the local wetlands, from Sabine to Jean Lafitte to Port Fourchon to Venice – but swamps have always had a special place in her heart from straining to look out the car windows, barely awake, on family trips to visit the Mahes for Easter.

After college she stayed in Baton Rouge and got a job as a wetland ecologist at LSU. Then she fulfilled a dream she’d had since her elementary school class raised money to save the rainforest – she lived and worked as a research assistant in the Manu Biosphere Preserve in the Peruvian Amazon for six months. She had many adventures in the jungle including being stalked by jaguars, pelted with rotting fruit by spider monkeys, and she decapitated a monkey with a pocket knife. After a few more research adventures in the states, she decided it was time to settle down and she started her PhD in the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota. She studies how soil bacteria use and transfer energy. Specifically, she looks at whether or not there are patterns in the genomes of bacteria that let us know whether particular bacteria use energy more quickly (hare) or efficiently (turtle). She is currently working in concert with Argonne National Labs where she will post-doc after getting her degree and before getting a tenure-track faculty position.

Pamela enjoys training for triathlons she never competes in, watching LSU football games, riding bicycles, camping, taking photographs, and learning to play the fiddle.