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 areas Biological Oceanography, Environmental Microbiology, Biogeochemistry, Waterborne Pathogen, and Climate Change.
I received my Ph.D. from Duke Marine Lab. My PhD research focused on the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, the smallest but most abundant phytoplankton 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 influence 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 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
Apr 2024. Congrats to Robinson on being awarded the merit-based SAGE fellowship!
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 winning 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.