I was born with the ocean, and I want to breathe my last with the ocean.

My name is So Hyun (Sophia) Ahn, and I am a National Ocean Science Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS) Facility postdoctoral scholar at the Woods Hole Oceanography Institution.

Growing up ten minutes away from sea in Busan, South Korea, Oceanography has always been a natural interest of mine. Thorugh my undergrad studies, I became particularly drawn to biological oceanography. My research focuses on protistan plankton physiology and ecology, especially mixoplankton⏤protists that synergistically engage in both photoautotrophy and phagotrophy within a single cell. Functionally, mixoplankton can be divided into those with a constitutive ability to photosynthesize (constitutive mixoplankton; CM), and those that acquire photosynthetic capabiliteis from  photosynthetic prey (non-constitutive mixoplankton; NCM). I am broadly interested in physiology of CM, but my primary interest is on the trophic transfer of material and energy from the prey, mixoplankton to higher trophic levels.