Dr. Ken Buesseler

Ken Buesseler is a marine radiochemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity that he founded in 2013. He is best known for work using natural and manmade isotopes in the ocean to study processes such as the movement of carbon and iron from the surface to deep ocean, as well as studies of the fate and transport of radioactive contaminants in the ocean. Dr. Buesseler participated in two ocean iron fertilization (OIF) experiments, leading one of three research vessels during the last major US OIF experiment off Antarctica. He is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union; a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and a Geochemistry Fellow of the Geochemical Society and European Association of Geochemistry. He is also a foreign member of the Dutch Academy of Sciences. He has been author or co-author on more than 200 research publications with 10 papers focused on OIF, including the 2021 NASEM report on marine CO2 removal. He was noted as the top cited ocean scientist by the Times Higher Education for the decade 2000-2010.