Christian Johnson is a second-year marine biology Ph.D. student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). He began developing GASP with Dr. Maria Vernet and Dr. Andy Allen in the spring of 2023. While it was initially proposed as a research project for his Ph.D., GASP has grown substantially since its conception. At SIO, he conducts research at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and serves as a visiting scientist on Viking expedition ships during the austral summer. His current interests involve understanding how nutrient inputs from penguin colonies around the Western Antarctic Peninsula affect phytoplankton communities, using GASP to explore these interactions. His introduction to polar research began through a research fellowship with Dr. Allison Cusick and the FjordPhyto project, where he first began investigating polar ecosystems.

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Dr. Maria Vernet is a marine phytoplankton ecologist specializing in polar environments, both Antarctic and Arctic. Her interests span from taxonomy to primary production, dynamics of plankton communities, planktonic food webs and pelagic-benthic coupling. Her approach has been primarily experimental, based on laboratory and field studies, including inverse modeling of food webs. Over the past 25 years, her research has focused on ice-phytoplankton interactions, studying plankton response after Antarctic ice-shelf breakup and more recently the influence of glacier meltwater in Antarctic and Greenland fjords. The Vernet Lab collaborates with the Antarctic Peninsula tourist ship industry (IAATO) to sample phytoplankton along Peninsula fjords, successfully obtaining valuable scientific data while engaging non-scientists in research.

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Dr. Lisa Zeigler is a microbial and viral ecologist using laboratory, field-based, and computational approaches to investigate food web dynamics and virus-host interactions. She received her Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD-SIO) in 2011. Her research centers on microbial (algal and bacterial) and viral communities within highly productive marine ecosystems. These ecosystems range from surface waters driven by photosynthesis to deep-sea hydrothermal regions fueled by chemosynthesis. Her laboratory combines large environmental datasets with laboratory-based studies of emerging model systems from these regions to measure biodiversity, examine interactions within microbial food webs, and explore how changes in physical-chemical environments influence ocean biota. With expertise in global genomic analyses of marine microbes and viruses, as well as detailed investigations at the single-cell and single-virus level, her work often pushes technological boundaries. This requires the development of innovative methods for isolating single cells and viruses in both wild and laboratory settings. Recently, she and her team have expanded their fieldwork to include real-time sequencing and analysis using Oxford Nanopore technology, which the GASP team has successfully adapted for the Antarctica-based program.

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Bryce Ellman is a marine biologist with extensive experience in oceanographic fieldwork, genomic analysis, and environmental monitoring. She received her B.S. in Marine Biology from UC San Diego and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she now works as staff researcher, leading innovative initiatives aboard NOAA and UNOLS vessels. Her expertise spans CTD operations, plankton and microbial sampling, metabarcoding library preparation, and real-time imaging flow cytometry. Passionate about interdisciplinary research collaboration, she strives to advance our understanding of marine ecosystems, while fostering inclusivity and diversity in science. Outside of work, Bryce actively engages with the community as a naturalist volunteer at the San Diego Natural History Museum and loves to spend her free time at the beach or practicing aerial silks.