Rebecca Gast joins the OPP Antarctic Sciences Section as a Program Director for Organisms and Ecosystems

Dr. Rebecca Gast joins the NSF Office of Polar Programs from the Biology Department, Woods Hole Institution of Oceanography, where she is an Associate Scientist. Dr. Gast received her PhD in Molecular Genetics from the Ohio State University in 1994. Dr. Gast’s research pairs contemporary genomic technologies with more traditional lab and field approaches to studying marine organisms. A focus of her research is to evaluate the diversity and ecology of environmental protists. She also studies tubulin protein adaptations associated with psychrophilic functions to better understand how organisms have evolved to operate in the extreme cold. Since 2021, Dr. Gast has co-led the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Mixotrophs and Mixotrophy Working Group (https://www.us-ocb.org).