Oscar Schofield

Position
Professor of Oceanography, Rutgers University
Role
Theme 1 Co-Investigator, Theme 3 Co-Lead
Office
School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ 08901
Bio/Description

Interests

Applying new technologies to understand how ocean food webs are structured by the ocean physics and chemistry.

Biography

Oscar Schofield is a Professor of Biological Oceanography at Rutgers University interested in how plankton dynamics structure marine food webs and feed back on the ocean’s biogeochemistry.  His research focus has combined genetics and biochemistry with the development of new ocean observing technologies (satellites, radars, and autonomous underwater vehicles).  He is co-Director and co-Founder of the Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory (COOL), which has become a technology and research group of 5 faculty and a team of over twenty technicians and students.  The COOL group has been awarded and managed over fifty million dollars in competitive awards from NOAA, Office of Naval Research, Department of Homeland Security, NASA and the National Science Foundation over the last 20 years.  Dr. Schofield’s research efforts have focused on polar and temperate waters with extensive efforts in the Southern Ocean, with ongoing research along the West Antarctic Peninsula and the Ross and Amundsen Seas. The group has also focused on integrating the research into innovative education and outreach efforts spanning K-12 to undergraduate students and the general public.

Dr. Schofield has been a co-PI on a NASA-funded project to supply SOCCOM floats with bio-optical sensors to provide additional information on biological processes in the water column and will be active in float data analysis. For SOCCOM3, he will also lead Rutgers' outreach efforts, promoting scale-up of undergraduate use of ocean observations through development of lessons for the Ocean Data Labs Online Lab Manual.