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 effects of climate change and climate variability on the California Current Ecosystem, the population ecology of marine zooplankton, copepod biology, demographic estimation methods, and the use of autonomous methods in zooplankton ecology.

Ohman serves as the lead Principal Investigator of the NSF-supported California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site. He is currently working on climate change effects on zooplankton of the California Current System, applications of inverse models to infer demographic rates in stage-structured zooplankton populations, the consequences of submesoscale fronts for zooplankton population dynamics, and the development of the Zooglider, a novel autonomous ocean glider designed for optical and acoustic sensing of zooplankton.

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.

He is Vice-President of the World Association of Copepodologists, a member of the Science Council of the U.S. LTER Network, and has previously served on 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 (Advancing 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 2022