Levine Laboratory

The Levine Lab is tackling key challenges in Biological Oceanography related to evolution and cycling of organic carbon – work that will allow us to generate more robust predictions of what our future world will look like. Marine microbes are the engines that drive the cycling of carbon and nutrients in the oceans and are responsible for approximately half of all global photosynthesis. The Levine Lab seeks to understand the ways in which climate variability influences these microbial systems and to identify how microbial systems impact climate in return (ecosystem-to-climate feedback loops). We are developing innovative, interdisciplinary numerical models that provide new insight into how dynamics occurring at the scale of individual microbes impact large-scale ecosystem processes such as rates of global carbon cycling. Our work is generating new mechanistic insight into ocean carbon cycling and how the ocean carbon cycle might change in response to shifts in climate.