Terry Hazen, Governor’s Chair for Environmental Biotechnology, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times about research that has discovered that the geography and 
water circulation patterns of the northern Gulf of Mexico promoted the breakdown of oil and gas spewing from a busted wellhead during the BP oil disaster. Hazen led groundbreaking research about how the giant clouds of oil from the Deepwater Gulf spill seemed to disappear. His team identified oil-eating bacteria that proliferated below the ocean surface helping to break down and clean up the oil plume.