SCOPE Investigator Benjamin Van Mooy Receives 2024 MacArthur Fellowship

The MacArthur Foundation has selected oceanographer Benjamin Van Mooy as a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Known colloquially as the “genius grant”, this award provides $800,000 over five years to creative individuals demonstrating excellence across a variety of fields. Van Mooy is an investigator with the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) and a department chair at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Van Mooy was selected for his work exploring the biogeochemical networks that sustain life on Earth. With SCOPE, he investigates how marine lipids produced by plankton support healthy ocean life, as well as how this process is changing as the ocean warms. He also studies how phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transport it to the deep ocean, helping reduce the negative impacts of fossil fuels.

“The ocean’s role in Earth’s climate system is defined by the thousands of invisible plankton in every drop of seawater,” Van Mooy told the MacArthur Foundation.

“These plankton, and the molecules they contain, are my passion. The role of plankton in critical ocean processes remains a mystery, but the molecules in plankton, particularly lipids, can help us ‘see’ plankton, and thus the ocean, in entirely new ways. When we look at plankton through the perspective of molecules, we can better understand how the ocean is responding to the changing climate.”

Van Mooy currently chairs the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received his B.A. in chemistry and geology at Northwestern University before earning his Ph.D. in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington.