Mark Ohman

Mark Ohman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Graduate Division in the Integrative Oceanography Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. As a biological oceanographer, his research focuses on autonomous measurement methods including the Zooglider and moorings, population ecology of marine zooplankton especially planktonic copepods, climate change effects on California Current pelagic food webs, and demographic estimation techniques such as mortality rates in stage-structured populations. He earned a B.A. in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Biology from California State University, San Francisco, and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Washington, Seattle. Ohman served 30 years as Curator of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Pelagic Invertebrate Collection, the world's preeminent collection of marine zooplankton. He consolidated holdings, developed electronic search tools and databases including the Cooperative Zooplankton Dataspace, and promoted its use in research, teaching, public education, and outreach.

Ohman co-founded the NSF-supported California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research site, serving as founding principal investigator. He held leadership positions such as Vice-President of the World Association of Copepodologists, member of the U.S. LTER Network Science Council, Scientific Steering Committees for the U.S. Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry program and U.S. GLOBEC program, SCOR working group on zooplankton time series, NSF Ocean Sciences Decadal Planning Group, and numerous NSF advisory panels. Ohman served on editorial boards of the Journal of Plankton Research, Chinese Journal of Oceanology and Limnology, and LTER Trends Analysis project. Key publications include 'Density-dependent mortality in an oceanic copepod population' (Nature, 2001), 'Planktonic foraminifera of the California Current reflect 20th-century warming' (Science, 2006), 'A double-integration hypothesis to explain ocean ecosystem response to climate forcing' (PNAS, 2013), 'Mesoscale ocean fronts enhance carbon export due to gravitational sinking and subduction' (PNAS, 2017), and 'Carbon sequestration by multiple biological pump pathways in a coastal upwelling biome' (Nature Communications, 2023). Awards include Scripps Outstanding Graduate Teaching award, UCSD Community Champion Award for diversity enhancement, and editors' citations for outstanding reviewing in Limnology and Oceanography and Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Sustaining Fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.