At sea
Erica Goetze is a biological oceanographer and Associate Professor in the Department of Oceanography at University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research focuses on the ecology, genetics and evolution of marine zooplankton. She is currently funded by the US National Science Foundation to work in two primary research areas: (1) population genetics/genomics of marine zooplankton, and (2) development of new molecular tools to study plankton dynamics in the coastal ocean. On this AMT24 cruise, she will be working with graduate students Michelle Jungbluth and Alice Burridge on zooplankton ecology and population genomics. When not at sea, she spends as much time as possible outside with her daughters Eva (8 years) and Hanna (4 years).
Michelle Jungbluth is a graduate student in Oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her dissertation research focuses on the role of copepod nauplii, or the early larval stages of copepods, in marine food webs. Her Masters work focused on development of a quantitative PCR (qPCR)—based molecular method to enumerate one species of naupli in mixed field samples. She is now using this method to examine how different species respond to environmental perturbations, and obtain new knowledge about the contribution of nauplii to the transfer of material and energy through marine food webs. Most of Michelle’s dissertation research has focused on plankton dynamics within Kaneohe Bay, the largest embayment in Hawaii. On this AMT24 cruise, she will be moving out into the open ocean, to examine naupliar diversity, distribution, and species-specific patterns of abundance across the Atlantic Ocean.
Alice Burridge is a PhD student at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden as well as at the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Already as an undergraduate student Alice’s attention was captured by pteropods, planktonic snails also known as ‘sea butterflies’. After her Bachelor in Earth Sciences she decided to focus her attention on Biology and finished a Master degree in Limnology & Oceanography. Thus far, Alice has applied geometric morphometric, biogeographic and genetic techniques to study evolution of pteropods. On the AMT24 cruise, she will be collecting planktonic snails for future morphological and genetic work and examine species abundance patterns along the transect. Alice also writes a personal blog about her adventures during this cruise (in Dutch).
On land
Katja Peijnenburg is a marine evolutionary biologist and works at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden as well as at the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Her overall research goal is to understand how marine zooplankton evolve. She also seeks to understand whether zooplankton have significant capacity for adaptive responses to recent climate change. Katja Peijnenburg is the main supervisor of the PhD research of Alice Burridge and is committed to science outreach. She also loves spending time with her three children: Koen (9 years), Orla (7 years) and Marlijn (5 years).
Basin-scale exploration of Atlantic plankton 