Dr Ruth Airs

Dr Ruth Airs is a Senior Analytical Biogeochemist and Head of Postgraduate studies at PML. Her research on nitrogenous osmolytes focusses around the controls on their natural distributions in marine systems including UK coastal seawater and the Southern Ocean, their relevance for marine microbes, as precursors for methylamines and their importance for atmospheric chemistry. Ruth’s other main research interest is in photosynthetic pigments.

Ruth uses sedimentary pigment distributions to inform studies of pelagic-benthic coupling, and studies the formation of chlorophyll alteration products during phytoplankton fate processes. Ruth also manages the phytoplankton pigment facility at PML, overseeing datasets produced for the Atlantic Meridional Transect programme, the Western Channel Observatory and Earth Observation projects. Ruth has a BSc and PhD in Chemistry from the University of York, and undertook a short post-doc in aquatic microbial ecology at the University of Girona before joining PML in 2002.