Barbara grew up playing outside, her pockets packed with rocks, chestnuts, and all sorts of other natural things. "I think it's part of the reason why [my mother] had me take over the laundry very young," she said. Ontario, Canada was her home, near the point at which the Great Lakes flow into the St. Lawrence River, alongside the rocks that "I've then gone on to spend my life studying."
Barbara Sherwood Lollar is now an earth scientist at the University of Toronto. She investigates groundwater and the carbon cycle, as well as underground hydrogen gas, and recently published a paper showing where hydrogen gas reservoirs are found naturally all over the world. She hopes to connect this database with people who want to use hydrogen for industrial uses, as well as for producing clean local power. She also helped discover microorganisms living deep within the rocks beneath the Earth's surface that are powered by hydrogen, not sunlight. One of these microbes is called Sherwoodlollaribacterium unditelluris, named after her.