Dr. ZHOU Kuanbo recently joined Xiamen University's College of Ocean and Earth Sciences as an Associate Professor and became a member of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science in December 2021.
Dr. Zhou obtained his PhD in Environmental Science from Xiamen University in 2014 under the co-supervision of Professors Minhan Dai and Ken Buesseler from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Following his doctoral studies, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's first research center outside the United States. During his time at SMART from 2014 to 2017, he collaborated with Professor Ed Boyle from MIT on trace metal analysis. Subsequently, Dr. Zhou returned to the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, where he served as an associated research scientist from 2017 to 2021.
Dr. Zhou's research focuses on the marine biological pump and export fluxes in the ocean. The ocean plays a significant role in modulating atmospheric CO2 through the biological pump, and the strength of carbon sequestration can be assessed by examining the magnitude of downward export fluxes. Additionally, various physical processes, such as eddies, fronts, and upwelling, operating at different time and space scales can induce biogeochemical responses in the upper ocean by altering physical conditions like nutrient and temperature distributions. These changes ultimately affect the variability of export fluxes. Over the past decade, Dr. Zhou has studied export fluxes under the influence of mesoscale eddies. His research findings include the importance of submesoscale processes in enhancing export fluxes in anticyclonic eddies and the temporal evolution of export fluxes, as well as the decoupling of particulate organic carbon and biogenic silica within cyclonic eddies. Currently, he is investigating the seasonal and spatial variability of export fluxes at the basin scale in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, as well as the underlying mechanisms driving such variability. Dr. Zhou has contributed over 20 peer-reviewed publications, most of which have been published in reputable oceanographic journals such as Biogeosciences, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Limnology and Oceanography, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, and Progress in Oceanography. His future research aims to further comprehend the variability of export fluxes under different physical conditions, understand the key processes governing export fluxes in the ocean, and explore the coupling and decoupling between carbon and other nutrient elements, including nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon, and iron.
For more information about Dr. Zhou, please visit his website at https://mel2.xmu.edu.cn/faculty/kuanbozhou/ or contact him via email at kbzhou@xmu.edu.cn.
