Jelena Godrijan, PhD

• I am currently a research associate at the Ruđer Bošković Institute and an adjunct principal investigator at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

• My research spans phytoplankton ecology and biological oceanography.

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• This year I was awarded the EMBO Installation Grant which will help me focus on coccolithophore life cycles in the next years

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• One of my recent publications: 'Osmotrophy of dissolved organic carbon by coccolithophores in darkness', raises fundamental questions about the role of the alkalinity pump and how it controls the alkalinity balance in the sea. If coccolith carbon is not originating from bicarbonate but instead from DOC-carbon, then the alkalinity pump paradigm needs to be revised. This is because coccolithophore calcification would not necessarily be at the expense of DIC. Instead, a fraction of the sinking calcite carbon could be associated with the largest organic carbon pool in the sea, the DOC pool. Uptake of DOC and transport to depth has typically been associated with the biological carbon pump. Thus, the potential rapid incorporation of DOC-carbon into coccoliths inextricably merges the alkalinity and biological carbon pumps in a way heretofore unappreciated.