A warm welcome to Danling Ma who will be visiting the Darwin Group for the next several weeks.

Danling is a master’s student from the Environmental Physics group (chaired by Prof. Nicolas Gruber) at ETH Zurich interested in the global carbon cycle and ocean biogeochemistry. While at MIT, she will be working on the assessment of skill in ocean ecosystem simulations by comparing species abundance distributions in the model and from observations.

Danling says she became interested in the global biogeochemical cycles as an undergrad. At ETH, she worked on a term paper about how nitrogen-fixing diazotrophs might respond to a changing climate, and later wrote her master’s thesis on the trends and drivers in the global surface ocean carbonate system.

“These projects drew me to the field of marine biogeochemistry and the ocean carbon cycle,” says Ma. “I reached out to Mick for an opportunity to work in his group as a visiting student because his group does a lot of work on the marine biogeochemical processes and how they regulate the global carbon cycle.”

As an undergraduate Ma attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she majored in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences.

Excited to have you with us Danling!

Story image: In her spare time Danling likes hiking and traveling. “While studying in Switzerland, I went hiking in the Alps with my friends almost every weekend,” she says. “I also enjoy traveling to and living in different countries and learning about new cultures.”