Sophie Bonnet (MIO-CYBELE), winner of the ERC Consolidator Grant 2021

Sophie Bonnet, IRD research director at MIO, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for her 2.5 million euro HOPE project. This project aims to study the capacity of our tropical oceans to sequester CO2 via diazotrophs, microorganisms that fix atmospheric nitrogen and play an essential role in the biological carbon pump of the oceans;

Sophie Bonnet focuses her research on the role of phytoplankton (or micro-algae) in ocean carbon sequestration. After a PhD at Sorbonne University, she did a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA), before being recruited as a permanent researcher in 2007 at IRD.

She has coordinated several large-scale oceanographic expeditions in the Pacific Ocean, and has participated in many other missions (> 450 days at sea). She has authored 79 international publications, supervised 11 PhD and post-doctoral students, and coordinated the publication of several special issues as editor.

 
The project

She has just obtained a 2.5 million euro funding 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 to observe the surface and bottom ocean, simultaneously, and at high frequency (from hourly/day scale for several years),
and to understand the complexity of processes from the cell to the ecosystem scale.

> Sophie Bonnet was the 7th laureate in 2019 of the "Christian Le Provost" Grand Prix of Oceanography.