Arunima Sen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE), located more than 200 miles above the Arctic Circle. She received her BA in Biology from Earlham College and her PhD from Pennsylvania State University, where she studied community dynamics and temporal change in Western Pacific hydrothermal vents for her thesis. She recently completed a post doc at Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer (IFREMER) in north western France where she studied cold seep communities in the Gulf of Guinea and developed a method for large scale mapping of deep sea seeps via multibeam echosounder obtained backscatter and bathymetry data. Aboard the Falkor she will be helping to image established study sites to continue the time series study initiated during her doctoral work. Additionally, she will study animal heat sensitivity, some aspects of reproductive biology and possible symbiotic associations between the large, dominant fauna and microscopic animals living in their gill cavities. This will be Arunima’s fifth cruise and second to the Western Pacific.

Cruises: