Dr. P. Dreux Chappell is an Associate Professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She has an interdisciplinary background with a BA in Biology from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and is interested in studying the interplay between phytoplankton physiology and ocean chemistry. She runs the BIogeochemistry and OMICs of Marine Environments (BIOME) lab at USF.
Her group’s research spans molecular microbial ecology, phytoplankton cultivation and physiology, and trace metal biogeochemistry. Her group employs a suite of molecular biological tools, analysis of trace metal and macronutrient concentrations, and rate measurements to link biological activity and chemical distributions in controlled laboratory settings and in the field, with a goal of better informing biogeochemical models. She is particularly interested in using quantitative molecular tools to answer questions regarding the biological availability of different forms of nutrients to phytoplankton (i.e., iron as dissolved, particulate, colloidal, or bound to organic ligands; phosphorus as phosphate, dissolved organic phosphorus; etc.), as these distinctions can have significant geochemical implications.
She has two decades of experience in both developing and applying molecular methods to assess phytoplankton and di-nitrogen-fixing (diazotroph) community composition and species abundance. She has developed molecular methods to quantitatively evaluate nutrient limitation of diatoms and diazotrophs in the field and is part of a team of researchers working to intercalibrate methods for marine microbial eukaryote transcriptomics. She has experience in isolation and trace metal clean cultivation of both eukaryotic phytoplankton and diazotrophs and maintains a trace metal clean culturing facility. She has extensive experience with oceanographic fieldwork as part of collaborative teams.
