Sophie Bonnet, IRD research director at the MIO, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for her HOPE project, funded to the tune of €2.5 million. The aim of the project is to study the capacity of our tropical oceans to sequester CO2 via diazotrophs, micro-organisms that fix atmospheric nitrogen and play an essential role in the oceans' biological carbon pump;
Sophie Bonnet focuses her research on the role of phytoplankton (or micro-algae) in ocean carbon sequestration. After completing her PhD at Sorbonne University, she did a post-doctorate at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA), before being recruited as a permanent researcher at the IRD in 2007.
She has coordinated several major oceanographic expeditions in the Pacific Ocean, and has taken part in numerous other missions (> 450 days at sea). She is the author of 79 international publications, has supervised 11 doctoral and post-doctoral students, and has coordinated the publication of several special issues.
The project
It has just received funding of €2.5 million for the HOPE project (How do diazotrophs shape the ocean biological carbon pump? A global approach, from the single cell to the ecosystem).
This project aims to study the capacity of our tropical oceans to sequester CO2 via an alternative carbon pump, using innovative tools:
allowing the surface and bottom oceans to be observed simultaneously and at high frequency (on an hourly/dayly scale for several years),
to understand the complexity of processes from the scale of the cell to the ecosystem.
> Sophie Bonnet was the 7th winner of the Christian Le Provost Grand Prix d'océanographie in 2019.