Rate My Professor Mike Stukel

Mike Stukel is the Department Chair Professor of Oceanography and Environmental Science in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University. He received his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego in 2011 under advisor Michael R. Landry, an M.Sc. in Marine Biology from the same institution in 2010, and a B.A. in Integrated Science and Biology from Northwestern University in 2004. Prior to his faculty appointment at Florida State University as Assistant Professor from 2014 to 2019 and Associate Professor since 2019, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Horn Point Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, from 2011 to 2014.

Stukel's research centers on plankton ecology and marine biogeochemistry, exploring zooplankton's role in the biological carbon pump, carbon sequestration processes, nitrogen cycling, and impacts on fisheries and climate. Leading the FSU Plankton Ecology and Biogeochemistry Lab, his interdisciplinary team studies these dynamics in regions such as the Southern Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, California Current Ecosystem, Amazon River Plume, and Pacific upwelling zones. He has earned awards including the NASA NESSF Graduate Fellowship (2009-2010), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2005-2008), Wyers Fellowship (2008), and Henry L. & Grace Doherty Fellowship (2004-2005). Prominent publications include "Salp blooms drive strong increases in passive carbon export in the Southern Ocean" (Décima et al., Nature Communications, 2023), "Carbon sequestration by multiple biological pump pathways in a coastal upwelling biome" (Stukel et al., Nature Communications, 2023), "Quantifying biological carbon pump pathways with a data-constrained mechanistic model ensemble approach" (Stukel et al., Biogeosciences, 2022), and highly cited papers such as "Mesoscale ocean fronts enhance carbon export due to gravitational sinking and subduction" (PNAS, 2017). His scholarship has garnered over 4,100 citations on Google Scholar, advancing knowledge of marine ecosystem responses to environmental change.