Book excerpt: This book highlights perspectives, insights, and data in the coupled fields of aquatic microbial ecology and biogeochemistry when viewed through the lens of collaborative duos – dual career couples. Their synergy and collaborative interactions have contributed substantially to our contemporary understanding of pattern, process and dynamics. This is thus a book by dual career couples about dual scientific processes. The papers herein represent wide-ranging topics, from the processes that structure microbial diversity to nitrogen and photosynthesis metabolism, to dynamics of changing ecosystems and processes and dynamics in individual ecosystems. In all, these papers take us from the Arctic to Africa, from the Arabian Sea to Australia, from small lakes in Maine and Yellowstone hot vents to the Sargasso Sea, and in the process provide analyses that make us think about the structure and function of all of these systems in the aquatic realm. This book is useful not only for the depth and breadth of knowledge conveyed in its chapters, but serves to guide dual career couples faced with the great challenges only they face. Great teams do make great science.