Adina Paytan Drinking with a Lobster!
Biography The major focus of Dr. Paytan’s research is understanding marine biogeochemical cycles in the present and the past. Dr. Paytan was born and raised in Israel and after a mandatory military service of two years went traveling to India and Nepal and hiking the Himalayas for another two years. She got her B.Sc. double major in Biology and Geology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Realizing how important science education is to the well-being of our planet I pursued a M.S. degree in science education at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Dr Paytan developed a curriculum in field geology for high school students, which has been implemented successfully and then got another masters degree, this time in oceanography, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her thesis was on oxygen isotope exchange between water and phosphate via biological cycling. In 1989 she moved (with Ron) to San Diego to take part in the Ph.D. Graduate program at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Her thesis was on marine barite as a recorder of oceanic chemistry, productivity and circulation. After 6 years she graduated with a degree and a daughter (Tali) and stayed in San Diego (UCSD) for a post doc, this time producing a high resolution sea water S isotope curve for the past 120 Ma. In the summer of 1999 Dr. Paytan moved to Stanford (as part of the new Ocean Program and the Environmental Science, Engineering and Policy Program) and since then is working as an assistant professor in oceanography at the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences.
Research Interests: Dr. Paytan’s principal research interests lie in the fields of paleoceanography, chemical oceanography and marine biogeochemistry. The goal of her research is to use the chemical and isotopic record enclosed in sea water and marine sediments to study present and past biogeochemical processes. This research spans a wide range of temporal (seasons to millions of years) and spatial (molecular to global) scales. An over-arching goal of this research is to link changing ocean composition to global changes in climate and tectonics. In addition Dr. Paytan is interested in natural and anthropogenically induced perturbation that effect biogeochemical processes in the ocean such as methane emission from wetlands, trace metal recycling in sediments, aerosol impact on marine biota and coastal water pollution. Biography Dr. Paytan focuses her work on the causes and consequences of climate change and coastal pollution. Trained as an oceanographer she uses the chemical signatures recorded in seawater, sediments, and living organisms to understand how the Earth System responds to natural and human induced climate and environmental changes over seasons to millions of years time scales. Dr. Paytan is the author of over 60 scientific publications, including review articles on barite and on the P cycle. She has received numerous awards including the AGU – Oceanography Early Career Award, NSF Early CAREER Award and the NASA New Investigator Award. She is currently and assistant professor in the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University.