Rate My Professor Frank Loeffler

Frank Loeffler serves as Goodrich Chair of Excellence in Civil Engineering and professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He previously held the position of Governor’s Chair Professor at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2010 to 2023, during which time he directed the university’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Prior to his appointments at the University of Tennessee, Loeffler was a faculty member in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Loeffler earned a B.S. degree in Biology and Agricultural Sciences from the University of Hohenheim in Germany in 1986, an M.S. degree in Microbiology and Biochemistry from the same institution in 1990, and a Ph.D. degree (summa cum laude) in Technical Biochemistry/Microbiology from the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg in 1994. He completed postdoctoral research as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in the NSF Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University from 1994 to 1999. His research focuses on biogeochemical processes in soil, sediment, subsurface, and water environments, integrating cultivation-based techniques with genetic, biochemical, analytical, meta-omics, and computational methods to study microbial physiology, diversity, distribution, and ecology relevant to nitrogen turnover, carbon cycling, and contaminant detoxification. Loeffler is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Shimizu Visiting Professorship at Stanford University, and multiple project-of-the-year awards from SERDP and ESTCP. He maintains the Loeffler Lab at the University of Tennessee.