University of Washington's E. Virginia Armbrust is lecturer at Port Townsend Marine Science Center's Future of Oceans Series, Sunday, Feb. 11, 3 p.m.

School of Oceanography director to discuss phytoplankton in a changing ocean climate

Admission: $5 (students, teachers free)

E. Virginia Armbrust, Ph.D., Director of School of

Oceanography at the University of Washington

E. Virginia Armbrust, Ph.D., director of the University of Washington School of Oceanography, will be the featured speaker in the fifth and final installment of the Port Townsend Marine Science Center's 2017-18 series, "The Future of Oceans."

Armbrust's lecture, "Phytoplankton in a Changing Ocean Climate," will take place at the Chapel at Fort Worden State Park, Port Townsend, Wash., on Sunday, Feb. 11, at 3:00 p.m.

"Dr. Armbrust is known for her innovative approach to oceanography," said PTMSC Executive Director Janine Boire. "While her research focuses on the micro-world of phytoplankton, the implications of her work have an important global reach. These tiny organisms create much of the oxygen in our atmosphere. In her lecture she'll be sharing how the rapidly changing ocean climate impacts this microscopic life form."

Most recently, Armbrust has identified chemical signals that form the basis of cross-kingdom communication. Her group developed ship-board instrumentation that now permits the fine-scale continuous mapping of distributions, growth rates and loss rates of different groups of phytoplankton.

"Dr. Armbrust's research focuses on marine phytoplankton, particularly marine diatoms, which are responsible for about 20 percent of global photosynthesis," said Boire. "She has pioneered the use of environmental genomics and transcriptomics, combined with metabolomics, to understand how natural diatom communities are shaped by the environment and by their interactions with other microbes."

Armbrust received her A.B. from Stanford University in 1980 and her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1990. She carried out postdoctoral research training at Washington University before joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 1996. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Washington State Academy of Science.

This is the fifth installment of The Future of Oceans lecture series (click here for more details)

This event is offered with generous support by the Darrow Family.

Assisted Listening Devices available