Postdoctoral Associate
L. Alex Kahl
Rutgers University
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences
71 Dudley Rd.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
tel: +1 732 932 6555
alex-at-marine.rutgers.edu
I am now working as a AAAS S&T Diplomacy Fellow in Washington, D.C. I have left this page in tact to provide information on my career as a scientist. I still have access to my email on this website if you would like to contact me.
As a postdoctoral associate at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, I engaged in research related to the export of carbon from the sea surface. My PhD. thesis, also completed at Rutgers, was focused on exploring the stickiness of marine algal cells (phytoplankton). The stickiness, or adhesion effeciency, of phytoplankton is a biologically mediated yet little understood control of plankton biomass export (principally thought of as carbon) from the sea surface. As phytoplankton convert about half of the earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen, the export of carbon from the sea surface to the deep sea sediments is a significant sink of carbon from the earth's atmosphere. Currently, my post doc position has placed me in Antarctica, where I have broadened my research to include polar ecosystem processes.