FELS Inaugural Lecture with Professor Stephanie Henson Event

Time:: 3:30pm
Date:: 2025-12-03 15:30:00
Venue:: National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

Event details

This is the second Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in our 2025-26 series that celebrates the careers of our newly appointed Professors. On Wednesday 3rd December 2025, Professor Stephanie Henson from the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Professor Julian Leyland from the School of Geography and Environmental Science will present their research.

Watch the lecture video

Watch all the lecture videos from the 2025-26 series here.

Professor Stephanie Henson

Down to the deep – the ocean’s role in the carbon cycle

The biological carbon pump is a series of processes that transfers organic carbon from the surface ocean into the deep ocean. Without the ocean’s biological carbon pump, atmospheric CO2 concentrations would be approximately 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. However, much of the functioning of the pump remains poorly known due to its complexity and the difficulty in adequately observing its many components. This therefore makes it difficult to model the pump, so our knowledge of how this important component of the global carbon cycle might respond to climate change is poor. In this talk I’ll present recent progress on using shipboard and autonomous vehicles to quantify variability in the biological carbon pump, discuss the current limitations in our understanding of the pump, and the implications of those knowledge gaps for robust modelling of the current and future pump.

Biography

Professor Stephanie Henson is a Principal Scientist at the National Oceanography Centre and Honorary Professor at the University of Southampton. She leads a large, active research group in global biogeochemical oceanography. Her particular research interests aim at understanding the natural variability and climate change effects on phytoplankton populations, and subsequent impacts on the biological carbon pump. Her research exploits autonomous vehicles, satellite and in situ data, as well as output from biogeochemical models. In 2024, she received the European Geosciences Union’s Fridtjof Nansen medal for “outstanding research into the ocean’s role in the carbon cycle, built on her extraordinary ability to combine diverse observational data with novel biogeochemical models.” She was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report, on the chapter “Carbon and other biogeochemical cycles and feedbacks”.