The School of Marine Sciences presents
Dr. Deborah Bronk
President and CEO
Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences
Deborah Bronk became the President and CEO of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in February 2018. She holds a B.S. in marine science and biology from the University of Miami (1986), a Ph.D. in Marine Estuarine and Environmental Science from the University of Maryland (1992), and was was a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1993). In 1994, she joined the faculty of the Department of Marine Science at the University of Georgia where she became a tenured associate professor in 1998. She moved to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in 2000 where she served as the chair of the Department of Physical Science.
As a researcher, she is fundamentally concerned about the health of aquatic systems, and especially the role of nitrogen. We get our nitrogen from the protein we eat, but phytoplankton and bacteria, at the base of the ocean food web, take up dissolved nitrogen from the seawater around them. Professor Bronk’s work ranges from pioneering basic research into how organisms take up and produce nitrogen in the ocean to applied questions about the composition and removal of nitrogen in wastewater treatment plants. She has lead or participated in over 50 research expeditions from the Arctic to Antarctica.
Polycom availability with Darling Marine Center, Gulf of Maine Research Institute, and Bigelow Laboratories.
Host: Heather Leslie