Karin Lochte thought that she would be content teaching biology and chemistry. But a marine-science training course made her realize she preferred generating new knowledge as a scientist. Now a sought-after expert on the ocean's role in global climate change, Lochte says her most recent move will demand that she continue to inform a contentious policy debate with robust scientific findings. See CV

As a postdoc at the Institute of Marine Science, University of Kiel, Lochte examined carbon turnover in the deep sea. To understand carbon-cycle dynamics relevant to climate change, it was important to understand how carbon is biologically exported from the sea surface to the sea floor, effectively exiting the carbon cycle. “With this work, I unintentionally drifted into the climate debate,” she says.

Her work then took a southward turn. As a research scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Lochte went to Antarctica to study how bacteria cooperate with phytoplankton in sea ice. She moved on to the University of Bremen in Germany, and then accepted a professorship in biological oceanography at the University of Rostock, in the former East Germany, to see first-hand the changing former communist region — and help establish a competitive scientific-research institute.

The move drastically altered her research. She began working on the nitrogen cycle in polluted coastal waters rather than carbon cycle in the open ocean. At the same time she was asked to sit on international scientific panels.

Ultimately, Lochte decided to return to her first love: open-ocean science. She focused on iron as an important 'fertilizer' of the ocean that can help to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel. Happy there, Lochte admits she had to be coaxed into her current position at the Wegener institute. But, she says, it's the perfect place to strengthen much-needed research in the Arctic, a region experiencing more rapid changes than any other ecosystem in the world. She laments how a lack of funding for the ships and infrastructure needed in polar regions is crippling marine research — a trend exacerbated by soaring oil prices.

Former colleague Carol Turley at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, UK, says that, with contentious issues such as climate change, it is important to have leaders such as Lochte with integrity as well as an appreciation of the whole picture. “Karin won't spin the facts,” says Turley.