Congratulations to Professor Senjie Lin who has been awarded the 2024 UConn-AAUP Excellence Award in the Research & Creativity: Career category, as well as the 2024 Alumni Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Creativity (Sciences)! These university-wide honors celebrate faculty who have demonstrated sustained academic excellence over their career and made significant contributions to a field of knowledge.
Dr. Lin is a world-renowned leader in the field of phytoplankton physiology and molecular biology. He develops and applies molecular tools (e.g., genomics and metatranscriptomics) to study phytoplankton, primary producers who form the base of marine food webs.
Prof. Lin is an expert on dinoflagellates, a type of phytoplankton that are increasingly important to study because this group is often involved in toxic algal blooms that can close fisheries and beaches and because some dinoflagellates are essential to coral health, which is deteriorating due to increasing coral bleaching events resulting from climate change.
As part of his research, Prof. Lin has developed new molecular tools such as mitochondrial barcoding for taxonomic identification of dinoflagellates, and developed a new molecular marker based on a specific dinoflagellate genomic trait (DinoSL) which is used to identify and separate dinoflagellate RNA from genetic materials from other types of phytoplankton. Both techniques are now widely used throughout the international research community as demonstrated through the many citations on these articles.
Prof. Lin’s work has also demonstrated how dinoflagellates and diatoms acquire phosphorus and provided new insights into the drivers of harmful algal blooms.
Professor Lin has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and in 2023 he was ranked in the top 2% of global scientists based on his citations.
Congratulations to Professor Lin on this well-deserved honor!
