Last August, A. Murat Eren, who goes by “Meren,” leaned over the edge of a boat off the coast of Hawai‘i. Then, holding a 20-liter plastic jug, he submerged his arm into the Pacific Ocean and filled the container with water teeming with microscopic life. Recalling the moment in his blog, he wrote, “This was the first time in my life I was physically contributing to the generation of samples that we were going to use to understand things later.” By “things,” Meren was referring to how ocean microbes respond to changes in their environment. And what tickled Meren most was that despite being a trained computer scientist, he was now firmly entrenched in the world of marine microbiology. Meren feels there is no question more fascinating than how marine microbial communities adapt to the planet’s changing environment. “It’s a problem that influences all life on Earth,” he says.
After studying computer engineering in Turkey, Meren moved to the United States and began doctoral research on machine learning and signal processing at the University of New Orleans. Later, in a different lab, Meren saw how powerful computation could be for addressing biological problems. He developed a computational method to quantify microbe diversity. “The biology grew on me,” he says, “and I realized I didn’t want to do anything else.” So after graduating in 2011, Meren headed to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, for a postdoctoral position in Mitch Sogin’s lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory. …
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