Please join us October 10th, 4-5pm in EE303. Refreshments (drinks and
pizza) will be provided.
*Francois Ribalet** (UW, Oceanography)*
Francois Ribalet received his Ph.D. from the Open University of London, UK,
and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, IT, where he first began
to study the microbial ecology of marine ecosystems. He conducted
postdoctoral research at the University of Washington, where he examined
how physical and chemical gradients influence the distribution, abundance
and activity of microbial communities. He uses advanced technology for the
automated measurement of microbial populations and their activity at the
single cell level, and develops tools to facilitate the analysis of the
high volume of flow cytometry data. His current research focuses on
determining the selective forces that shapes the patterns of microbial
communities across ocean basins.
*Unveiling the Dynamics of Microscopic Algae Populations Across Ocean
Basins at Sub-kilometer-resolution.*
Microscopic algae anchor the oceanic food web and are responsible for the
majority of our planet’s oxygen. About 50% of organic carbon production on
Earth occurs within the ocean and the vast majority of this organic carbon
is generated and recycled by these small microorganisms. Being able to
readily detect and track these microorganisms is critical for understanding
their impact in the oceans and global biogeochemical cycles. I will present
SeaFlow, a new flow cytometer developed at the UW, that measures
continuously the size and pigment composition of individual microorganisms
present in a sample of seawater at the rate of thousands of cells per
second. To date, SeaFlow has covered 60,000 km and characterized over 200
billions of cells collected in different parts of the oceans. I will
explain how this high-resolution data set is allowing us to discover
unexpected gradients of microbial cell diversity and to better understand
the dynamics of microbial populations across ocean basins. I will also
describe some of the tools we developed to automate the analysis of flow
cytometry data and visualize the data in real-time. Finally, I will present
how we are incorporating our existing cyberinfrastructure into eScience’s
collaborative database system, known as SQLshare, to meet our long-term
goal of managing, integrating, and sharing increasing oceanographic data.
*Upcoming Seminar:*
* November 14, 4 PM (EE303)
*Ian Gorton * (PNNL)
Velo: A Knowledge Management Framework for Modeling and
Simulation
