Dr. Thomas Mock, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, will present a Distinguished Lecture in Microbiology entitled ???Eukaryotic Marine Phytoplankton: From Genomes to Biomes??? at 4:15 pm on Wednesday, February 13, in 112 Pearson Hall.

Dr. Mock is a member of several genome projects with marine microalgae (e.g. diatoms) and bacteria and conducts transcriptome analysis with diatoms to find the molecular basis of adaptation to environmental conditions. A crucial part of this research is the identification of metabolic pathways and their key regulatory components to determine how they sense changes in environmental conditions. This fundamental knowledge about microbes from the upper ocean will help to interpret future responses to global change.

After obtaining his undergraduate degree in Biology with emphasis on Biological Oceanography at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Dr. Mock obtained his PhD at the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research at Bremen University, in Germany. Most of his Postdoctoral research was conducted in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in joint cooperation with the Biotechnology Center at the University of Wisconsin.

This Distinguished Lecture in Microbiology is sponsored by the Department of Microbiology and is free and open to the public.