Biological Oceanography

As a seagoing oceanographer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography whose research focuses on marine planktonic food web structure and function. She combines in-situ work in the temperate and polar ocean of primary production and phytoplankton mortality, laboratory measurements of plankton behavior and physiology, and theoretical modeling work to establish linkages between microscopic events and macroscopic phenomena. Previously, Dr. Menden-Deuer was a research fellow at Princeton University with Simon Levin and a lecturer at Western Washington University. She received her PhD in 2004 and MSc in 1998, both in oceanography at the University of Washington with Daniel Gruenbaum and Evelyn Lessard, respectively. She received her first degree in 1996 from the University of Bonn, Germany, having worked with Victor Smetacek at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Sciences, and spent a year at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She has also been active in enhancing diversity and science communication in oceanography and serves on the editorial boards of oceanographic publications and the Board of Directors of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO).