Robert Letscher

Robert Letscher
Nationality	American
Occupation	Chemical oceanographer
Alma mater	University of Miami

Robert Letscher is a chemical oceanographer and Assistant Professor of Chemical Oceanography in the Earth Sciences department at the University of New Hampshire. His research concerns dissolved organic matter cycling in the ocean, including dissolved organic nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon, and their roles in marine nutrient budgets and productivity.

Education

Letscher studied Marine Science and Chemistry at the University of Miami from 2003 to 2007. He continued at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, completing work in chemical oceanography with a focus on marine and atmospheric chemistry from 2007 to 2012.

Career

From 2012 to 2016, Letscher was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. He remained at UC Irvine as a Project Scientist in Earth System Science from 2016 to 2017. In 2017, he joined the University of New Hampshire as Assistant Professor of Chemical Oceanography in the Earth Sciences department.

Research

According to Semantic Scholar, Letscher has authored 50 papers that have been cited a total of 1,283 times, giving him an h-index of 17. His work includes studies on preferential remineralization of dissolved organic phosphorus and its effects on marine productivity, nitrogen fixation, and carbon export, published in 2015 and cited 154 times. He has also published on the distribution and fate of dissolved organic nitrogen in the global surface ocean, and on nutrient budgets in subtropical ocean gyres dominated by lateral transport.

National Science Foundation records show four awards to Letscher at the University of New Hampshire totaling $1,376,385. These include a 2024 award for research on the contribution of allochthonous dissolved organic nitrogen to biological nitrogen demand in the subtropical North Pacific ($398,972), a 2021 award examining controls on the marine refractory dissolved organic carbon reservoir ($371,107), a 2019 award studying transparent exopolymer and phytoplankton vertical migration as sources of preformed nitrate anomalies in the subtropical North Pacific Ocean ($491,322), and a 2018 award on dissolved organic phosphorus controls on marine nitrogen fixation and export production ($114,984).

Selected publications

• Preferential remineralization of dissolved organic phosphorus and non‐Redfield DOM dynamics in the global ocean: Impacts on marine productivity, nitrogen fixation, and carbon export (2015)
• Dissolved organic nitrogen in the global surface ocean: Distribution and fate (2013)
• Nutrient budgets in the subtropical ocean gyres dominated by lateral transport (2016)
• Simulations With the Marine Biogeochemistry Library (MARBL), Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (2021)
• Rapid removal of terrigenous dissolved organic carbon over the Eurasian shelves of the Arctic Ocean (2011)
• Variable C : N : P stoichiometry of dissolved organic matter cycling in the Community Earth System Model (2014)
• Large Stimulation of Recalcitrant Dissolved Organic Carbon Degradation by Increasing Ocean Temperatures, Frontiers in Marine Science (2018)
• New nutrients exert fundamental control on dissolved organic carbon accumulation in the surface Atlantic Ocean, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2016)
• N2O production and consumption from stable isotopic and concentration data in the Peruvian coastal upwelling system (2017)
• Microbial community composition and nitrogen availability influence DOC remineralization in the South Pacific Gyre (2015)

External links

• Robert Letscher on ORCID