Carol Robinson

Chair, Scientific Steering Committee (IMBeR)

Professor Robinson is currently Professor of Marine Sciences within the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, where she is also a member of the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, and the Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. She is presently the chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the SCOR/Future Earth Global Research Project ‘Integrated Marine Biosphere Research’ (IMBeR). Professor Robinson leads a team which studies the role of marine bacteria, phytoplankton and zooplankton in the global cycling of carbon and oxygen, and how this varies in space and time and with changing environmental conditions such as increasing nutrient supply, temperature and carbon dioxide and decreasing dissolved oxygen. Professor Robinson also developed an analytical system to continually measure seawater dissolved inorganic carbon and used this to determine the spatial variability in the North Atlantic CO2 sink, the impact of coccolithophore blooms on oceanic carbon uptake and the imbalanced uptake of carbon and nitrogen by phytoplankton. Recent projects have included the determination of oxygen photolysis as a potential bias in the determination of plankton production, the impact of coastal upwelling on carbonate chemistry, the relationship between apparent oxygen utilisation and dissolved organic carbon, and determination of the proportion of plankton respiration attributable to bacterioplankton.