Professor Thomas Kiørboe (Dr. Scient), of DTU (Technical University of Denmark), enjoyed a residency in ‘The Philosopher’ during the Spring of 2025 and here he worked on the research article ‘Diatoms–copepods: An evolutionary arms race’ now published and available at https://doi.org/10.1002/lno.70355.
Professor Kiørboe is the author of about 270 peer reviewed journal articles and 2 books (see his publication list). He has also written multiple popular science articles in Danish and international journals.
Photo collage from article (https://doi.org/10.1002/lno.70355), used under CC BY 3.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nitzschia-kerguelensis_hg.jpg).
Professor Kiørboe’s research interests include:
Trait-based ocean ecology
This approach replaces species with individuals defined by key traits linked through trade-offs. Our goal is to identify traits that best represent organism fitness across ocean life forms, to quantify trade-offs, and to generalize findings beyond experimentally studied species.
Functional ecology of plankton
Rather than relying solely on black-box incubation experiments to quantify foraging, this research seeks an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, exploring how feeding currents are generated, and prey is detected, captured, and consumed or rejected across plankton types, from bacteria to larval fish.
Functional diversity of phagotrophic flagellates and of flagella
Flagellates, often treated as a uniform group, are actually among the most phylogenetically and functionally diverse eukaryotes. We are exploring this overlooked functional diversity.
Early eukaryotic evolution
Phylogenetic approaches to construct the eukaryote tree of life typically use molecular and morphological cues from contemporary flagellates. Both have issues. We propose to use ‘function’ as an additional lens.