David Karl, SCOPE Co-Director, Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

David Karl, co-director of the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE), was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) on April 22.

The AAAS is among the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research. The society aims to advance science, engineering and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.

David Karl is the Victor and Peggy Brandstrom Pavel Chair in Oceanography and director of the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His research interests concern oceanic energy and matter transformations ranging from solar energy capture to the major cycles of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur. He has developed and employed novel analytical techniques to study ecological and biogeochemical processes in the sea, with a focus on blue-water oceanography.

Karl has conducted research at sea since 1973, participating in 23 expeditions to Antarctica. In 1988 he co-founded the Hawai’i Ocean Time-series (HOT) program, which has conducted sustained physical, biogeochemical and microbial measurements and experiments at Station ALOHA in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre for an unprecedented 27 consecutive years. In 2006, he led a team of scientists in establishing a new Science and Technology Center at the University of Hawai’i, supported by the National Science Foundation. As director of C-MORE, Karl conducts collaborative research on marine microorganisms — from genomes to biomes — and aims to prepare the next generation of microbial oceanographers.

Karl has received several awards and honors, including the 2015 DuPont Award in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Medal from the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, the Henry Bryant Bigelow Medal from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Alexander Agassiz Medal from the National Academy of Sciences and an honorary D.Sc. degree from the University of Chicago. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Academy of Microbiology, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.