Dr. SHEN Yuan is a new faculty member in the College of Ocean and Earth Sciences. He joined XMU as an associate professor and became a member of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science (MEL) in August 2020. Dr. Shen received his PhD in marine science in 2017 from the University of South Carolina under the direction of Dr. Ronald Benner. Shortly after he graduated, he moved to the University of California-Santa Cruz and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Matthew McCarthy and Dr. Thomas Guilderson's lab for three years (2017-2020).
Dr. Shen's research has been driven by a desire to understand biogeochemical cycles of organic matter in the changing global ocean. Earth's ocean holds a vast quantity of dissolved organic matter (DOM) that cycles in disparate rates. A small fraction of this material is bioreactive and rapidly exchanges with atmospheric CO2 through biological production and respiration, whereas the remaining seems refractory and persists in the ocean for centuries to millennia. Predicting ocean carbon cycle feedbacks to climate has been hampered by a number of uncertainties related to both the reactive and refractory DOM pools. Chief among these uncertainties is an understanding of the response of the two DOM pools to changing ocean conditions. Dr. Shen's work includes the development of molecular indicators that allows for broad-scale characterization of the reactive DOM pool under varying oceanic conditions in various ecosystems and the design of laboratory observations that helps solve an enduring mystery of the refractory DOM pool. In addition, Dr. Shen has long been working on a project that involves compound-specific amino acid isotope analysis (CSI-AA) of deep-sea sediment traps and deep-sea corals, with the overall goal of developing new paleoceanographic proxies for reconstruction of past climate impacts on ocean systems.
【Figure 2. Circumpolar distribution map of total (left) and (right) active dissolved organic carbon in the Arctic surface (Shen et al., 2018 GRL)】
【Figure 2. Regional chromatographic model for groundwater organic molecular migration and transformation (Shen et al., 2015 Biogeochemistry)】
【Figure 3. Marine inert dissolved organic carbon migration model (Shen and Benner, 2018 Scientific Reports)】
Dr. Shen's work has contributed to 10 first-authored and 8 co-authored peer-reviewed publications that have been cited more than 570 times.
Dr. Shen’s research areas at XMU include but are not limited to: 1) large-scale temporal and spatial characterizations of bioreactive DOM in changing aquatic ecosystems; 2) the persistence and removal of refractory DOM in the deep ocean; 3) microbial transformations of sinking particulate organic matter (POM) in the dark ocean, and 4) reconstruction of past nutrient and ecological changes in the surface ocean.
For more information about Dr. Shen, please visit his websitehttp://mel2.xmu.edu.cn/faculty/YuanShen/ or contact him at yuanshen@xmu.edu.cn.
