Follows enrolled at the University of East Anglia, where he earned a master’s degree and a PhD in atmospheric sciences, studying atmospheric circulation of ozone. While exploring graduate programs, he was particularly drawn to atmospheric science. “I liked the organization brought to the world,” Follows says. He then decided to pursue studies in math and physics at the University of Leeds. He ultimately continued his studies at a community college, and spent a year at an art school - a fact that he’d rather overlook: “My work was rubbish - terrible!”
“I don’t think people think of me this way now, but I was a bit of a loudmouth,” Follows recalls. “She worked in shops, and in the field, but would be quoting Shakespeare,” Follows says of his mother’s path.įollows was less inclined toward school, and ended up leaving high school. Both his parents have roots in Manchester - “a downtrodden, post-industrial place,” Follows says - where his mother was nevertheless able to win a scholarship to a good public school. His father was a typesetter at a local newspaper, and his mother worked in a men’s clothing shop. While growing up, Follows didn’t expect he would end up in academia: School wasn’t a priority then.įollows grew up in a small town in the British region of East Anglia, and fondly remembers “riding bikes around the countryside, and living quite freely.” “I feel much more connected to the Institute as a whole.” “I’m now interacting with undergraduates in a way I wasn’t doing in my little research hole, and I have a whole new appreciation for the broader aspects of MIT,” Follows says. He was granted tenure as an associate professor in 2013. “There’s a balance: Do you want to understand every detail of the world, or do you want to be able to stand back and have a big picture view? Somehow you have to keep circling around it from both directions to develop that view.”įor more than 20 years, Follows has worked as a research scientist at MIT, answering such questions. “We’re starting to open up the black box of simple models,” Follows says. Instead, Follows is working at an intermediary level, developing models of marine microbes at the cellular and community levels, to tease out fundamental processes that may be worked into global climate models. But lumping phytoplankton into a big “black box” can be equally unenlightening. He says wrestling such diversity into global climate models is a futile task. Such diversity can appear, at the outset, “bewilderingly complex,” says Mick Follows, an associate professor of oceanography in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).
But figuring out exactly how these organisms contribute to climate change is a tricky undertaking, primarily because they are so diverse: Any given species may have a set of genetic or physical characteristics entirely different from any other, leading to different behaviors and habitats. Phytoplankton play a fundamental role in regulating Earth’s climate. When these plants die, they drift to the ocean bottom, or evaporate into the air as carbon - a process that generates more than half the world’s cycling carbon. Through photosynthesis, these tiny organisms supply more than half the world’s oxygen. Together, phytoplankton anchor the ocean’s food chain, supplying nutrients to everything from single-celled organisms on up to fish and whales. The oceans are teeming with more than 5,000 species of phytoplankton - microscopic plants in a kaleidoscope of shapes and sizes. Dip a beaker into any portion of the world’s oceans, and you’re likely to pull up a swirling mix of planktonic inhabitants.
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