Amy Maas is an assistant professor in the School of Ocean Futures with a joint appointment in the School of Life Sciences. She is a comparative ecophysiologist who studies the biogeochemical role of zooplankton in open ocean systems and the effects of climate change on these organisms.
Amy received her PhD from the University of Rhode Island in 2011, where she worked in Antarctica and at sea in the Eastern Pacific exploring the impacts of climate-related variables on pteropods living in extreme environments. As a Postdoctoral Scholar/Investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution she worked in the Biology Department studying regional and seasonal patterns of pteropod metabolic and transcriptomic sensitivity to ocean acidification (2011-2015).
Maas moved to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences as an Assistant Scientist in 2015. There she leveraged the access to the sea and time series to provide a greater ecological and biogeochemical context for her studies and to begin to ask questions about the interactions between zooplankton, the microbial community, and carbon flux. This resulted in new projects, including a privately funded line of research, BIOSSCOPE, which details the diversity and biogeochemistry of the diel changes in the open ocean, a NASA EXPORTS project focused on developing a predictive understanding of zooplankton contributions to carbon flux, a NOAA grant assessing biological indicator species along the east coast, four NSF BIO-OCE projects exploring 1) circadian rhythms in the zooplankton, 2) the hydrographic controls on zooplankton size, abundance and biodiversity, and 3) the impact of zooplankton on particle formation and transformation in the Sargasso Sea and 4) analysis of the oxygen and temperature dependence of migratory species, as well as an NSF OTIC grant developing a new instrument to asses zooplankton abundance and contribution to midwater ecology.
In fall of 2022 she joined ASU as an Assistant Professor. Her current research is focused on understanding zooplankton roles in food webs and biogeochemical cycling, to identify how changing environmental factors will affect these organisms, and to implement this understanding in our predictive models of how marine ecosystem function.