UCI assistant professor Katherine Mackey says the early-career award "will help support several of my new projects looking at how phytoplankton acclimate and adapt as the Earth system changes." Steve Zylius / UCI

Katherine Mackey, UCI’s Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Earth System Science, has been awarded a 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in ocean sciences for her pioneering work in marine biogeochemistry. Each year since 1955, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded two-year fellowships to 126 promising early-career scientists in the U.S. and Canada. Nominated by their peers, fellows receive $60,000 to further their work. In her lab, Mackey studies the role of biological and chemical cycles and climate dynamics in the Earth’s oceans. Her approach merges modern oceanographic disciplines with new insights about how phytoplankton ecology and biogeochemical conditions respond to environmental change. “Marine phytoplankton do half of all photosynthesis on Earth and directly influence global biogeochemical cycles and climate, but there are still many fundamental unanswered questions about how they will respond to global change,” Mackey said. “I am honored to receive the Sloan Fellowship and grateful that it will help support several of my new projects looking at how phytoplankton acclimate and adapt as the Earth system changes.” Mackey became an assistant professor at UCI in 2014 and that same year was awarded the Clare Boothe Luce endowed professorship in support of exceptional female researchers in STEM fields. She has also received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.