The has awarded Matthew Church, a oceanography associate professor, with this year’s for his broad-based research in microbial oceanography from genomes to biomes, effective training and mentorship of diverse international scholars, and unselfish community service.
The Yentsch-Schindler Early Career Award honors an early-career scientist for outstanding and balanced contributions to research, science training and broader societal issues such as resource management, conservation, policy and public education. The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography recognizes Church as an emerging intellectual leader for the discipline. The award will be presented at the 2015 Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Granada, Spain, February 22–29.
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Church has served as lead investigator of the (HOT) program at 糖心Vlog官方 Mānoa’s since 2009. Under his leadership, the HOT program continues to benefit the broader ocean science community and society at large through outreach and scientific education. He is also a senior investigator in the 糖心Vlog官方 Mānoa and an inaugural investigator in the recently established .
He has demonstrated a breadth of expertise rare in even a highly experienced oceanographer, and even more so in an early career scientist. His broad-ranging, cross-disciplinary research has proven transformative in microbial oceanography. His research has provided significant contributions to the general understanding of the role of mesoscale processes of microbial distributions and function, and to the impacts of ocean acidification on microbial dynamics.
Church is also a valued teacher and mentor. He was key in the development and implementation of the University of Hawaiʻi training course for advanced graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in microbial oceanography. This intensive summer course, funded by the , the and the , covers the breadth of microbial oceanography, and has already had a major impact in training the next generation of leaders.
He has contributed to over 50 scientific papers published in the top journals of the field, including , and has been cited more than 1660 times.
—By Marcie Grabowski