Dr. Naomi Levine is a distinguished researcher at the forefront of understanding marine microbial ecosystems and their interactions with Earth's climate system. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California with joint appointments in the Departments of Marine and Environmental Biology, Quantitative and Computational Biology and Earth Sciences. Dr. Levine earned her B.A. in Geosciences from Princeton University in 2003 and completed her Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography through the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in 2010. Following her doctoral studies, she held a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University from 2010 to 2013, followed by a Postdoctoral Investigator position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Her early career trajectory established her as a leading voice in interdisciplinary oceanographic research that bridges biological, chemical and physical sciences.
Her pioneering research focuses on elucidating the complex mechanisms through which climate variability influences marine microbial communities and how these systems in turn impact global climate processes. Dr. Levine has developed innovative interdisciplinary numerical models that bridge the gap between micro scale microbial dynamics and macro scale ecosystem processes such as global carbon cycling. Her laboratory builds microbial ecosystem models derived from overarching principles of microbial ecology, integrating these biological frameworks with realistic physical and chemical environmental conditions to generate testable hypotheses about oceanic biogeochemical cycling. This approach has yielded significant insights into how organic carbon accumulates in marine environments and how microbial adaptation occurs in response to environmental fluctuations. Her work has substantially advanced our understanding of the marine biological pump, which transfers carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, playing a critical role in Earth's climate regulation.
Dr. Levine's contributions have been recognized with prestigious awards including the Sloan Research Fellowship in Ocean Science and the Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator award in Marine Microbial Ecology. Her research has produced influential publications in leading journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addressing fundamental challenges in biological oceanography related to the evolution and cycling of organic carbon. As a leader in her field, she is generating more robust predictions about how microbial ecosystems will respond to future climate scenarios, providing critical insights for climate modeling and policy. Currently, her laboratory continues to tackle pressing questions about cost benefit relationships in microbial co growth and their implications for ocean scale biogeochemical cycles. Through her integrative approach, Dr. Levine is shaping our understanding of how tiny marine organisms collectively influence planetary scale processes that affect the entire Earth system.
