Her Ph.D. is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and M.S. from the University of Helsinki, Finland. She has postdoctoral experience from the University of California Santa Cruz and the NASA Ames Research Center, and is a recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and a National Research Council Fellowship. Pia uses microbiological, molecular, genomic, and biogeochemical approaches in field and laboratory studies on aquatic microbial and phytoplankton ecology, including cyanobacterial bloom ecophysiology and nitrogen fixation. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles and is an Associate editor of the Journal of Plankton Research.