Victoria J. Orphan is the James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science and Geobiology in the Divisions of Geological and Planetary Science and Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. She received her B.A. in 1994 and Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the ecology, evolution and marine biology program. Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech in 2004, she was a National Research Council fellow at the NASA Ames research center.