Colomban De Vargas PhD

Dr. Colomban is a Research Director at the CNRS France, and leader of the EPEP – Evolution of Pelagic Ecosystems & Protists – the team at the Station Biologique de Roscoff, Colomban de Vargas has co-authored >80 scientific publications around his main research interest, How rich and diverse is plankton life, and how has plankton life evolved, and transformed/stabilized the Earth system? Along his 20-years long scientific career from Tahiti (MSc, 1995) to Switzerland (PhD, 2000), USA (PostDoc at Harvard and Assistant Professorship at Rutgers), and France, Colomban has supervised >15 PhD students and postdocs, and coordinated major research programs on marine plankton (paleo)ecology.

He pioneered the use of combined genetic, morphological, and geological data to assess rates and modes of biodiversity change in planktonic unicellular eukaryotes or protists on various ecological to geological time scales. Since 2008, he coordinated the ‘biodiversity’ and ‘protist’ components of the Tara Oceans expeditions (http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org/), exploring the networks and dynamics of modern plankton eco-systems using high-throughput DNA sequencing and imaging technologies. Until 2020, Colomban will coordinate the program OCEANOMICS (wOrld oCEANs bioresources, biotechnologies, and Earth-systeM servICeS, http://www.oceanomics.eu/), aiming at analyzing and transferring to the society the complex eco-morpho-genetic datasets collected during Tara Oceans. He is also organizing an international fleet of volunteer sailing boats -the planktonauts-, that will collect plankton samples on relevant spatial and temporal scales, promote a novel citizen-enabled and sailing oceanography, and take the pulse of the biodiversity and health of our oceans in our fast-changing world.