I am a seagoing biological oceanographer and an assistant professor at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. I am interested in understanding the energy fluxes in marine ecosystems and the elemental fluxes in biogeochemical cycles. In particular, I study carbon exports in the sunlit surface ocean.
Current research interests Biological Oceanography, Environmental Microbiome, Biogeochemistry, Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR), and Climate Solutions.
I received my Ph.D. in Marine Science and Conservation from Duke University. My PhD research focused on the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, the smallest but most abundant photosynthetic organisms in the ocean. I established a method to measure the genotype specific growth rates using ribosomal RNA contents, and related the growth rates to different environmental variables in tropical and subtropical oceans.
Since my postdoc training, I have been working intensively with the polar ocean systems. I study how microbial communities (both autotrophs and heterotrophs) and their interactions drive biological carbon exports measured by the underway O2/Ar method. I am currently building a FARACAS (Cassar et al., 2018) to measure N2 fixation underway. My research is at the nexus of high-throughput molecular biology (omics) and high-resolution biogeochemistry. Combining these two directions provides me with unique tools to explore the mechanisms of carbon exports. And our findings benefit other fields such as biogeochemical modeling, food web dynamics, and ecosystem conservation.
Field projects:
Polar focused -
The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE)
Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)
Tropical coral reef system -
TARA Pacific Expeditions
Lab news
Jul 2024. Our co-authored paper on modeling ocean carbon export ratios is accepted by Ecological Modelling . Congrats to all our collaborators!
Jul 2024. We are excited to welcome Zack Zhong, our new PhD student, who will be joining our lab in August!
Jun 2024. Our co-authored manuscript on Antarctic N2 fixation is accepted by Communications Earth & Environment (Nature Portfolio, IF 8.1). Congrats to Shuai and all collaborators!
Jun 2024. Our manuscript is accepted by Scientific Reports (IF 4.6). Congrats to all coauthors! Check the preprint here Deep learning for predicting 16S rRNA copy number
Apr 2024. We will be joining Arc01, the trans-Arctic expedition crossing the North Pole, from late Aug - Oct 2024.
Jan 2024. Yajuan will be co-chairing a session at Ocean Sciences Meeting 2024, OB008-I: Linking Ecogenomics, Physiology, and Biogeochemical Cycles in a Changing Southern Ocean. Come to our session to hear about exciting science!
Dec 2023. We are grateful to Google for their generous provision of $5000 Google Cloud credits to help advance our research!
Nov 2023. Congrats to Mahima on being awarded the NSF funded STAGES fellowship!
Nov 2023. Check our new preprint on medRxiv. A citizen science approach for mapping total microbial communities and waterborne pathogens in household drinking water in China.