Stamieszkin Finds Inspiration From Smallest Marine Life

Like many budding ocean scientists, Karen Stamieszkin was drawn in by a childhood spent at the beach searching for creatures in tidepools. But it was a biological oceanography class as an undergraduate at Yale University that really opened her eyes up to the possibilities in the larger field — and to the expansive world of the smallest marine life. She got her master’s at Yale in environmental science but got her first break with a research job at the Center for Coastal Studies on Cape Cod studying zooplankton and whales.

“I think I got the job because I was in it for the ecology and the plankton more than for the whales,” Stamieszkin said. “I was just so amazed that these tiny animals could be so important — though it was a nice bonus that I also got to chase whales.”

Stamieszkin was blown away by how plankton, these tiny plants and animals hardly visible to the naked eye, could have such a big impact, feeding life throughout the ocean and producing much of the oxygen on the planet. As she continued to explore how zooplankton drive the global cycling of nutrients like carbon, it was perhaps inevitable that she’d find her way to Bigelow Laboratory. Since 2014, she has worked in various roles at Bigelow Laboratory from PhD student to postdoc to research scientist, but this fall, she became the institute’s newest senior research scientist.

Throughout her career, Stamieszkin has been driven by fundamental ecological questions about how the ocean functions.

After working for several years on Cape Cod, she accepted she’d need to return to school to lead — and fund — her own research projects. Stamieszkin pursued her PhD at the University of Maine, exploring the role of zooplankton in what’s known as the biological carbon pump, the complex process by which carbon moves from the surface to the deep ocean.

From there, she went on to fill postdoctoral positions, first at Bigelow Laboratory with Senior Research Scientist Nick Record, and then at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. That position at VIMS, she said, allowed her to dig deeper into the biological carbon pump while developing new field skills to complement the modeling and lab work she did in graduate school.

In her postdoctoral positions, Stamieszkin said, she also developed a clearer scientific identity as plankton ecologist. In 2022, she returned to Bigelow Laboratory as a research scientist.

Now, as a senior research scientist, Stamieszkin is working on several diverse projects, combining ecological theory, lab experiments, at-sea observations, and computer models.

She’s part of an interdisciplinary team, alongside fellow senior research scientist Ben Twining and Cath Mitchell, tracking plumes of volcanic ash-laden dust to illuminate how that ash, rich in micronutrients like iron, spurs blooms of phytoplankton.

She recently published research on how the distribution of mixotrophs — organisms that shift how they feed from photosynthesis to directly consuming on prey — is changing across the North Atlantic. She’s also working with fellow Senior Research Scientist Nicole Poulton to illuminate how cell shape and size influence how mixotrophic microbes can change their feeding habits.

Most recently, she got funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, alongside her former adviser Nick Record. They’re looking at how zooplankton facilitate the movement of carbon into the deep sea to inform efforts to leverage natural processes in the ocean to store excess carbon dioxide. The daily movement of zooplankton up and down the water column is considered the world’s largest animal migration, and Stamieszkin wants to understand how that process might influence carbon removal — and how, in turn, marine-based carbon removal efforts could affect zooplankton.

“What unifies all of this research is the question of how plankton communities respond to and shape their environment,” Stamieszkin said. “It's all about these interesting feedbacks between these organisms — what they look like and what they're doing — and their changing environment.”

Beyond the science, all of Stamieszkin’s work is also driven by a passion for sharing her research through teaching; giving back to the scientific community, which she said, inspires her as much as the science itself; and finding ways to make her research broadly relevant and meaningful.

“I feel like just understanding how the ocean works and helping humans better appreciate it is essential,” she said. “The functioning of the ocean and the plankton communities within it is key to how the planet sustains life, and if more people can internalize how interconnected everything is, we can be more careful with how we live.”

Photo Captions:

Photo 1: Stamieszkin (right) teaches participants in the BLOOM Educators program oceanographic sampling methods.

Photo 2: Stamieszkin (left) on a research cruise in the Gulf of Maine with URI graduate student Katherine Nowakowski.

Photo 3: A microscopy image of a microbe that has developed adaptations that enable mixotrophy of the type that Stamieszkin is studying (Credit: Colin Fischer).

Photo 4: Stamieszkin collects field data alongside students.