Ilka Peeken is a marine ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), where she investigates the biology, biogeochemistry and pollution of sea ice. She studied Marine Biology at the University of Kiel, and for her PhD project at the university’s Institute of Marine Sciences, she developed methods for directly recording difficult- to-measure ecosystem processes from the water’s surface to the deep seas of the Antarctic and Arctic Oceans using marker pigments.
After completing her PhD, from 1998 she worked at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, USA, were she devised a method of measuring stable isotopes in pigments from sediments. In 2000, Peeken returned to the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, where, until 2008, she studied the effect of the micronutrient iron on algae in the Southern Ocean (in-situ iron fertilisation experiments “EisenEx” and “EIFEX”). In addition, she focused on which role marine algae play in the production of climate-relevant trace gases.
This page was updated in November 2024.
