Researcher selected as a semi-finalist for world-class pitch competition

Dr. Deborah Tangunan has been chosen as a semi-finalist for the Falling Walls Lab 2021.

Falling Walls Lab is an international forum for the next generation of early-career innovators, creators, and visionaries. It aims to promote exceptional ideas and connect promising scientists and entrepreneurs from all fields.

Each year from March to October, academic institutions around the world host local Falling Walls Labs to showcase the quality, diversity, and passion of their region’s most innovative minds. In three minutes each, participants are given the opportunity to present their solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time to peers, a jury of experts from academia and business, and the general public. The winner qualifies for the global Finale in Berlin on 7 November and wins a ticket to attend the Falling Walls Science Summit.

Tangunan’s project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, focuses on the impact of past climate change on the marine ecosystem, particularly microscopic calcifying algae, called coccolithophores. Coccolithophores are one of the main groups of phytoplankton that are abundant in our oceans and the base of the marine food web.

The research is investigating an unprecedented suite of complete long marine sedimentary sequences – representing the million-year history of past climates – and using a combination of physical and geochemical parameters from the fossil remains of coccolithophores to provide a comparison to past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, ecosystem function, and integration of these data into a modelling framework.

The results of the study will offer knowledge of the potential future response of marine organisms to a warming world and will break the walls of the future design of evidence-based monitoring, mitigation, and management strategies of the marine ecosystem – and our environment as a whole.

If you would like to watch Deborah in the live semi-finals event, it is scheduled for early October.

We wish Dr. Tangunan all the best in the competition!