Welcome to Anne Cohen's Lab   E-mail     Print     PDF

	Dr. Anne L. Cohen. Click here to view her CV »
	Enlarge Image Lab group in June 2007 (left to right): Ryan Petit (high school science project), Michael Holcomb (grad student), Alex Pogue (guest student), Anne Cohen, Casey Saenger (grad student), David Spofforth (WHOI-NOC exchange student), Justin Ries (post-doc). (Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

I am interested in climate change and its impact on life in the oceans. Research in my lab is focused on decoding geochemical and structural information contained within the skeletons of marine organisms, living and fossil. We use this information to build records of past climate, and to study how climate change affects the ability of marine calcifying organisms to build their skeletons.

Some of our current projects include: 

• Building proxy records of past sea surface temperatures by measuring compositional and structural changes in the skeletons of massive, long-lived corals
• Developing new geochemical thermometers
• Quantifying changes in the growth and calcification of reef-building corals in response to climate change
• Conducting laboratory experiments with live corals and other calcifying plants and animals to quantify the impacts of temperature and pCO₂ on calcification (visit our Marine Calcification lab).
• Growing abiogenic (non-biological) carbonates from seawater with variable temperature and saturation states to provide a framework for understanding the response of biogenic calcification to similar changes in the natural environment (see Paleoceanography Research at WHOI)

To read more about these projects and tour our lab and analytical facilities, click on the research section. Our lab members include post-docs, graduate students, summer research fellows, guest students and exchange students. If you are interested in working with us via one of these programs, please visit WHOI’s educational pages or contact acohen@whoi.edu