Rate My Professor Jess Wenley

Dr. Jess Wenley is a marine scientist affiliated with the Department of Marine Science in the Sciences Division at the University of Otago. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Otago in 2023. Her PhD thesis, titled 'Through space and time: Seasonal and interannual bacterioplankton community dynamics at a coastal time series site,' was conducted under the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Wenley's doctoral research examined the temporal dynamics of bacterioplankton communities at coastal monitoring sites, exploring seasonal and interannual patterns influenced by environmental factors. Her work contributes to understanding microbial ecology in marine environments.

Wenley's research interests center on marine microbial communities, including prokaryotic linkages between surface and deep ocean waters, ecological drivers in microbial successions, and enzymatic activities under varying nutrient conditions. She has co-authored several peer-reviewed publications, including 'Seasonal Prokaryotic Community Linkages Between Surface and Deep Ocean Water' in Frontiers in Marine Science (2021), 'Ecological drivers switch from bottom-up to top-down during model microbial community successions' in The ISME Journal (2021), 'Resolving the paradox: Continuous cell-free alkaline phosphatase activity despite high phosphate concentrations' in Marine Chemistry (2019), and 'Microbial rhodopsins are increasingly favored over proteorhodopsins as major photoheterotrophic mechanism in coastal surface bacterioplankton' in Environmental Microbiology Reports (2021). These studies investigate bottom-up and top-down controls, phosphatase activity, and photoheterotrophy in coastal bacterioplankton. Her publications have collectively received over 160 citations according to Google Scholar metrics. From September 2022 to August 2023, Wenley served as a Lecturer at the University of Otago. She has also contributed as an advisor or supervisor in student theses and participated in field activities, such as sampling with Ngāi Tahu dive teams. Currently listed as academic staff in Marine Science, her contributions advance knowledge of microbial responses to oceanographic changes.