The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, announced last week that one of its faculty members, Andrew Barton, PhD, received a Simons Foundation Early Career Award to study phytoplankton — a type of algae that requires sunlight to survive and that serves as the basis for much of the marine food chain.
Dr. Barton’s research will use the Scripps Plankton Camera System, which provides real-time photographic images to monitor these phytoplankton. While not exactly offering the excitement or cuteness factor of the Golden Retriever Puppy Cam, this sort of technology is incredibly important to better understanding certain aspects of marine biology.
“This is an interesting project that brings cutting edge image-processing technology to the natural habitat to study complex organismal dynamics in the real-world setting,” says Brian Chow, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “Establishing the critical interplay between an organism’s form and function and the forces of its local and global environments are important problems in physical biology in general. Diatoms have long been studied by bioengineers interested in self-assembly, programmed assembly, biomineralization, and biomimicry, so the work may lead to some novel insights for our field.”
Congratulations to Dr. Barton on receiving this prestigious award.