Gaitan Gehin is now a PhD candidate in the Soils and Biogeochemistry at UC Davis. Gaitan began his PhD as a joint project between the Laboratory of Environmental Geochemistry (Faculty of Geosciences) and the Laboratory of Environmental and Evolutionary Microbiology (Faculty of Biology and Medicine) at the University of Lausanne. He obtained a Master degree in Biogeosciences from the University of Lausanne and the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 2019, winning the Faculty Prize for his work on the controlled synthesis of biogenic manganese oxides. For his Ph.D., Gaitan continues to work on manganese biomineralization and is doing so by combining genetic and molecular microbiology and geochemistry. He uses genetically engineered bacteria to report the activity of the genes responsible for manganese oxidation in order to better understand the link between environmental conditions, Mn oxidase gene regulation, and Mn oxide formation.