Chris Follett is an oceanographer interested in the interactions between the ocean’s biological and chemical systems. His educational background is in physics (BS, MIT), and chemical oceanography (PhD, MIT-WHOI). He joins the Darwin Project team to focus on the symbiotic relationships between nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria and diatoms.

Recent work, reported in his PhD thesis Heterogeneous Reservoirs in the Marine Carbon Cycle focused on the cycling of dissolved organic carbon in the ocean. Follett found evidence that the transfer of carbon from sinking particles into the dissolved carbon pool has a large influence on the steady state DOC concentration and radiocarbon age.