Photo credit : © Corentin Clerc
Catherine Jeandel is a geochemical oceanographer. She is a research director at the CNRS and works at the Laboratoire d’études en géophysique et océanographie spatiales (LEGOS), where she studies marine geochemistry in order to understand the mechanisms that determine the functioning of the ocean, in particular continent-ocean interactions.
Catherine Jeandel joined the CNRS in 1983. In 1988, she left for Columbia University (USA) to develop isotopic marine geochemistry and in 1990 rejoined the research team in Toulouse that would become LEGOS. She has carried out more than fifteen campaigns at sea, i.e. scientific expeditions that can last up to two months. From 13 January to 8 March 2021, she co-lead the Swings mission. Two months at sea collecting, sampling and filtering water with the aim of understanding how the ocean helps regulate the climate by absorbing atmospheric CO2.
She is coordinating a global geochemical sea exploration project called GEOTRACES (www.geotraces.org). Involved in scientific mediation, she is one of the Toulouse initiators of the Climate Train which criss-crossed France in 2015, on the occasion of the COP21.
Catherine Jeandel wrote, with Matthieu Roy-Barman, a book on marine geochemistry and co-edited with Rémy Mosseri and CNRS-Edition Le Climat à découvert, L’énergie à découvert then L’eau à découvert, books that list 100 articles written by 130 authors. She was elected to the presidency of the Academic Council of the Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées Federal University in September 2017. She was awarded the bronze medal of the CNRS in 1992, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2009, Officier de l’Ordre du mérite in 2013 and in 2018 she was awarded the Georges Millot medal by the Académie des sciences and was nominated as a fellow of the Geochemical Society and the American Geophysical Union.
