Distinguished Professor of The Graduate Division
Integrative Oceanography Division

Mark D. Ohman is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

A biological oceanographer, his research interests include the use of novel autonomous methods in zooplankton ecology (especially autonomous Zoogliders and moorings), the effects of climate change and climate variability on the California Current Ecosystem, the population ecology of marine zooplankton, copepod biology, and demographic estimation methods.

Ohman founded, together with colleagues, the NSF-supported California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site. He is currently working on applications of the Zooglider, an autonomous ocean glider designed and built at Scripps for optical and acoustic sensing of zooplankton; the consequences of submesoscale fronts for zooplankton population dynamics; climate change effects on zooplankton of the California Current System; and applications of inverse models to infer demographic rates in stage-structured zooplankton populations.

Born in San Francisco, California, Ohman received his bachelor’s degree in Biology at UC Santa Cruz, his master’s degree in Biology at California State University, San Francisco, and his Ph.D. in Oceanography at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Ohman served for 30 years as Curator of the SIO Pelagic Invertebrate Collection, perhaps the world’s preeminent collection of marine zooplankton. He has consolidated collection holdings, developed electronic search tools and databases (see the Cooperative Zooplankton Dataspace), and actively promoted the use of the collection in research, teaching, and public education and outreach.

He has served as Vice-President of the World Association of Copepodologists, a member of the Science Council of the U.S. LTER Network, the Scientific Steering Committee of the U.S. Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry program, the SCOR international working group on Global Comparison of Zooplankton Time Series, the Executive Council of the World Association of Copepodologists, the Scientific Steering Committee of the U.S. GLOBEC (Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics) program, the NSF Ocean Sciences Decadal Planning Group, and on a number of NSF advisory panels.  He also has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Plankton Research, the Chinese Journal of Oceanology and Limnology, and the LTER Trends Analysis project.

Ohman has received an award for Outstanding Graduate Teaching at SIO, a UCSD Community Champion Award for enhancing diversity, editors’ citations for Outstanding Service as Reviewer of Limnology and Oceanography and for Excellence in Refereeing for the Journal of Geophysical Research, Oceans.

Ohman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Sustaining Fellow of ASLO (Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography), and a member of the Ecological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the World Association of Copepodologists, and the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Last updated August 2024