Research Associate
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MSc Calicut University; PhD Incheon National University
Research Websites: Mubadala Arabian Center for Climate and Environmental ScienceS (ACCESS)
Research Areas: Marine monitoring, phytoplankton ecology, ecotoxicology, oil spill impacts
Sreejith Kottuparambil is a biological oceanographer specializing in ecotoxicology and phycology. He obtained his MSc in Environmental Science from Calicut University, India, and his PhD in Life Science from Incheon National University, South Korea.
Kottuparambil's career began as a researcher at CWRDM (India), where he contributed to water quality monitoring projects for the Kerala state government. During his doctoral research under Professor Taejun Han, he developed and validated ecotoxicological test methods focused on phytoplankton ecophysiology.
In his postdoctoral research at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center in collaboration with Professor Susana Agusti, Kottuparambil investigated PAHs toxicity on Red Sea picophytoplankton. His work revealed the impact of PAHs at the single-cell level, trophic transfer of PAHs to corals, and introduced an innovative flow cytometry method for monitoring PAH sorption on algal cells. He also highlighted climate change's influence on phytoplankton sensitivity to potentially toxic elements. Recently, he led a project detecting the 2019 Red Sea oil spill impacts, offering insights into oil degradation under extreme conditions.
Currently, Kottuparambil serves as a Research Associate at the Mubadala ACCESS Center and is a member of Professor Shady Amin's Marine Microbiomics Lab. At NYUAD, he explores phytoplankton dynamics in the Arabian Gulf. His goal is to establish a comprehensive phytoplankton database and contribute to AI-based biogeochemical models, thus enhancing the ability to predict events such as Harmful Algal Blooms.