Dr Ben Ward is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. He is a plankton ecologist using observations, ecological theory and numerical models to interpret the structure and function of plankton communities.
Together with Markus Schartau, he will work on modelling aspects of the Micro-ARC project, assimilating field data into marine ecosystem models.
He began his career studying wintertime phytoplankton growth in the Irminger Sea and has continued to examine phytoplankton growth at high latitudes. He completed his PhD in 2009, using data assimilation techniques to identify unconstrained complexity in marine ecosystem models.
A post-doc with the ‘Darwin Group’ at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led to the development of a novel size-based global ecosystem model that will be further developed in the Micro-ARC project.
