Tristan Biard
Principal investigator of ChORhizO

Over the past 15 years, I have delved into the fantastic world of Rhizaria.

During my PhD (supervised by Dr. Fabrice Not and Pr. Lars Stemmann) at the Station Biologique de Roscoff (part of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie), I was initially trained as a Rhizaria taxonomist and ecologist. I have worked extensively with molecular data, from single-cell barcoding to metabarcoding. These techniques allowed us to investigate Rhizaria phylogeny and biogeographical patterns. I also started working with in situ imaging techniques, particularly with the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche-sur-Mer (French Riviera). This is when we realised that Rhizaria were way more abundant than we initially thought.

With this PhD completed (in 2015), I moved to San Diego (United States) and joined the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) as one of two SIO postdoctoral fellows. There, I worked with Pr. Mark Ohman as part of the California Current Ecosystem LTER (CCE-LTER). It allowed me to broaden my research perspectives to ocean biogeochemistry. Specifically, we worked on quantifying the role of Rhizaria in the marine silicon cycle.

In 2018, I was recruited as an Assistant Professor at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, located in the Laboratoire d’Océanologie et de Géosciences. There, I successfully secured funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche for the RhiCycle project. The main output of this project was the first global model of Rhizaria distribution. It highlighted the unsuspected yet important significance of Rhizaria in the Southern Ocean. This result was one of the main motivations to build the ChORhizO project.

Aside from these scientific activities, I am heavily involved in teaching undergraduate and graduate students. The main topics taught are: marine ecology, biogeochemistry, and numerical ecology.