Professor Daniel Mayor

About me:

Professor Daniel J Mayor (@oceanplankton)

I lead the 'OceanPlankton' research group at Exeter. I am an observational and experimental biologist, and enjoy a balance of work at sea and in the laboratory. Work in our group is broadly concerned with understanding how organisms drive global biogeochemical cycles and how they are influenced by environmental change. A major part of our work involves collaborating with biogeochemical modellers, translating knowledge of plankton ecology and physiology into mechanism-focussed models that help reduce uncertainty in our projections of how the ecological and biogeochemical functioning of the global ocean will change in the future.

Much of our work focuses on marine copepods, tiny relatives of crabs and lobsters that are probably the most numerous animals on our planet. One estimate suggests that there are 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 copepods in the global ocean - two orders of magnitude more than all of the insects on land. Copepods drive one of the largest animal migrations on Earth, moving millions of tonnes of biomass into the deep ocean during the food-poor winter and reascending to feed in surface waters the following spring. This, and many other copepod-driven processes, help transport carbon down into the deep sea, where it may be locked away from the atmosphere for hundreds, or even thousands of years - thereby helping to regulate global climate. Given the importance of copepods in the global carbon cycle, there has never been a more urgent need to understand how they will be affected by environmental change.

Postgraduate Research opportunities:

I am open to email enquires from students with their own funding interested in pursuing an MSc by Research or PhD in any aspect of plankton research. I am also open to supporting students interested in applying to the China Scholarship Council, Commonwealth Scholarship, or other PhD funding schemes.

Qualifications:

2001 – 2005: PhD in Physiological Ecology, University of Southampton

1996 – 1999: BSc Hons in Marine Biology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Career:

Career to date:

2023: Professor, University of Exeter

2022: Associate Professor, University of Exeter

2022 – to date: Senior Visiting Fellow, National Oceanography Centre, UK

2019 – 2022: Marine Ecosystems Subgroup Leader, National Oceanography Centre, UK

2017 – 2022: Senior Principle Investigator (B4), National Oceanography Centre, UK

2015 – 2017: Principle Investigator (B5), National Oceanography Centre, UK

2014 – 2015: Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen

2014 – to date: Honorary Research Fellow, James Hutton Institute

2013 – 2014: Lecturer, University of Aberdeen

2012: Awarded Fellowship of the Challenger Society for Marine Science

2010 – 2013: NERC Independent Research Fellow

2007 – 2010: Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow

2005 – 2007: SARF Postdoctoral Research Fellow