PORT TOWNSEND — “Phytoplankton in a Changing Ocean Climate” will be presented at the Fort Worden chapel at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Admission will be $5 to the lecture, the fifth installment of The Future of Oceans series. Students and teachers will be admitted free.
Virginia Armbrust, director of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington, will tell of her research on marine phytoplankton, particularly marine diatoms, which are responsible for about 20 percent of global photosynthesis.
She has pioneered the use of environmental genomics and transcriptomics, combined with metabolomics, to understand how natural diatom communities are shaped by the environment and by their interactions with other microbes.
Most recently, she has identified chemical signals that form the basis of cross-kingdom communication. Her group developed ship-board instrumentation that now permits the fine-scale continuous mapping of distributions, growth rates and loss rates of different groups of phytoplankton.
Armbrust received her bachelor’s from Stanford University in 1980 and her doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1990. She carried out post-doctoral research training at Washington University before joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 1996.
She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Washington State Academy of Science.
