You are welcome to attend in person (masked, please!) at the MSI Auditorium. If you would prefer to attend Dr. Archibald's talk virtually, please register for the EEMB seminar series for access to the webinar.

Speaker

Dr. Kevin Archibald
Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology
UC Santa Barbara

Abstract

Marine microbial food webs are the foundation of all life in the ocean and play an important role in regulating global climate. Top-down controls on these food webs help drive their dynamics and contribute to important ecosystem functions, including carbon export/sequestration and community biodiversity. As global climate change steadily warms the world's oceans, it is important to understand how microbial ecosystems will respond to rising temperatures. I examine this problem from a variety of scales, from the scale of individual metabolic processes to the scale of global ecosystems, and use mathematical models to explore how top-down controls change as temperature increases and how microbial food web dynamics are affected.

Bio

Dr. Archibald received a B.Sc. in Quantitative Biology from the University of Delaware in 2015. As an undergraduate, he worked in an aeroecology lab, using data collected by the National Weather Service's network of radar stations to track birds and study their migration behaviors. Following graduation, he attended the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering. Dr. Archibald was mentored first by Scott Doney and later by Michael Neubert and Heidi Sosik, learning to integrate theoretical models with empirical observations to study marine microbial food webs. After defending his thesis, titled "The Role of Zooplankton in Regulating Carbon Export and Phytoplankton Community Structure: Integrating Models and Observations", he accepted a postdoc position at UCSB working with Holly Moeller studying the effects of climate change on marine microbial mixotrophs. As an oceanographer and ecosystem modeler, Dr. Archibald is interested in understanding food web dynamics across different scales of complexity and the ways that marine microbial ecosystems will respond to climate change. As a human, he enjoys books about hobbits, food with too much butter, and music with too many banjos.