Alumni
Paytan Biogeochemisty Lab

Kate Mackey Phytoplankton Biogeography and Biogeochemistry Carnegie Institution for Science 260 Panama St Stanford, CA 94305 kmackeyATstanfordDOTedu

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Biography

I grew up in Maryland and attended the University of Maryland, College Park, earning a BS in Biological Engineering and a BS in Plant Biology. Following graduation from UMCP, I moved to California to begin my graduate work in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University, where I completed my MS degree in May of 2004 and my Ph.D. in June of 2010. I am broadly interested in phytoplankton ecology and marine biogeochemistry. I am particularly interested in factors that affect the growth and distributions of phytoplankton throughout the worlds oceans, such as light and nutrient availability, and genetic diversity among phytoplankton strains. I currently live in San Jose with my husband, Tim, and my son, Mark. For more information on my professional activities, please refer to my CV in the link below.

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Project Description

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working with the Paytan lab at the Institute of Marine Science at UCSC and the Caldeira lab at the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford. I am currently involved in a number of exciting projects. In the lab, I am investigating the effects of elevated temperature and carbon dioxide levels on the growth of genetically distinct strains of Synechococcus to determine how their growth and distribution could be affected by climate change in the future. In the field, I am investigating the different effects of atmospheric deposition of nutrients and metals on phytoplankton. I measure the response of phytoplankton communities to aerosols with different amounts of nutrients and metals that are collected at various locations throughout the world. Some aerosols are beneficial, while others can be toxic to certain strains of phytoplankton; I am interested to know how this could affect the distribution of sensitive strains on a global scale. Our field work includes study sites in the Gulf of Aqaba Red Sea, Coastal Bermuda and the western Sargasso Sea, and the east China Sea.