Oceanography faculty member recognized with Early Career Award

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Matthew Church, (808) 956-8779
Oceanography Professor, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology
Marcie Grabowski, (808) 956-3151
Outreach Coordinator, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology
Posted: Jan 26, 2015

Dr. Matthew Church
Dr. Matthew Church

The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) has awarded Dr. Matthew Church, a UHM Oceanography associate professor, with this year’s Yentsch-Schindler Early Career Award for his broad-based research in microbial oceanography from genomes to biomes, effective training and mentorship of diverse international scholars, and unselfish community service.

The Yentsch-Schindler Early Career Award honors an early-career scientist for outstanding and balanced contributions to research, science training and broader societal issues such as resource management, conservation, policy and public education.  The award will be presented at the 2015 Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Granada, Spain, from February 22-29, 2015.

Dr. Church received his doctorate from the College of William and Mary before taking on a post-doctoral position with Dr. Jon Zehr at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Dr. Church has served as lead investigator of the Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series (HOT) program at UHM’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) since 2009. Under his leadership, the HOT program continues to benefit the broader ocean science community and society at large through outreach and scientific education. He is also a senior investigator in the UHM Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) and an inaugural investigator in the recently established Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE).

He has demonstrated a breadth of expertise rare in even a highly experienced oceanographer, and even more so in an early career scientist. His broad-ranging, cross-disciplinary research has proven transformative in microbial oceanography. Most recently, his research has provided significant contributions to the general understanding of the role of mesoscale processes of microbial distributions and function, and to the impacts of ocean acidification on microbial dynamics.

Further to his research, Dr. Church has distinguished himself as a valued teacher and mentor. He was key in the development and implementation of the University of Hawai’i training course for advanced graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in microbial oceanography. This intensive summer course, funded by the National Science Foundation, the Agouron Institute and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, covers the breadth of microbial oceanography, and has already had a major impact in training the next generation of leaders.

He has contributed to over 50 scientific papers published in the top journals of the field, including Limnology and Oceanography, and has been cited more than 1660 times. With this award, ASLO recognizes Dr. Church as an emerging intellectual leader for the discipline.

ASLO press release