A Scientist’s Life: Daniel Wangpraseurt

Daniel Wangpraseurt is a marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He received his bachelor’s degree from James Cook University in Australia in 2008, his master's degree in tropical marine ecology in 2010 from the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany, and his PhD in 2015 from the University of Technology, Sydney, in marine biology and biophysics. Wangpraseurt became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, then at Cambridge University. During that time, he was also a visiting scientist at Scripps Oceanography. He joined UC San Diego’s Department of Nanoengineering in 2020 and then joined Scripps as an associate research scientist in July 2024. He currently leads the Coral Reef Ecophysiology and Engineering Lab at Scripps.

explorations now (en): What do you do for a living?

Daniel Wangpraseurt (DW): I'm a marine biologist at Scripps and my group studies the ecophysiology of corals and develops new tools to engineer coral reefs for the future. 

Looking at the technologies we have developed over the last hundred years, it's just incredible at what pace we have developed tools that were unthinkable even a few years ago. I believe we can leverage a lot of these advances that are already existing and apply them to coral reefs. Innovation is about combining different disciplines in a unique way to develop effective solutions for coral reefs. 

en: What are some of the main questions in your field?

DW: Coral reefs are hotspots of ocean biodiversity. They're very beautiful and people enjoy them, so there's an aesthetic value in them and there's a cultural value. But at the same time, coral reefs have high economic value. Coral reefs provide an economic value of over $3 billion annually through coastal protection, through fisheries, and through tourism in the U.S. alone . We have to do everything that we can to protect, restore, and engineer new coral for the future. 

Coral reefs are rapidly degrading largely because of a combination of anthropogenic stressors. You have climate change. You have local stressors such as pollution, overfishing and so on. All that together reduces the resilience of coral reefs. What we are trying to do is to develop new tools that help the coral cope with these stressors. We try to reduce the competition of corals with other organisms, which is especially important when a reef is polluted. We also try to help corals through coral bleaching events, when corals lose the microscopic algae that provide energy for them. We also try to enhance coral recruitment—so basically we try to enhance the restocking of coral reefs.

en: What tools do you use in your research? 

DW: For the research we do, we use rather non-traditional techniques because we are very interdisciplinary. We take a lot of approaches inspired by biomedical sciences and bioengineering and we translate them to study corals.

If you visit an ophthalmologist, they might examine your retina using optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive imaging technique that provides detailed cross-sectional images of retinal layers to help diagnose diseases. We use the same technique to study corals. So we look at the structure and function of corals very close up. Through optical coherence tomography, we can image the microarchitecture of corals. The microarchitecture of corals controls the diffusion and exchange of gases with the environment, which modulates the physiology of corals. Another example is that we use bioengineering principles. We use techniques such as 3-D bioprinting, which basically means the manufacturing of living materials. We can take microscopic algae that live inside the coral and we can create these kinds of hybrid, coral-like systems. 

The workflow that we use is to understand how corals respond to certain stressors, so we look at the physiology of corals. For instance, we measure oxygen production and the photosynthesis of corals. We study how corals metabolize, grow and also how they reproduce. Based on that, we apply engineering principles to develop new tools. 

The unique aspect of my lab is that we are very interdisciplinary. We have polymer chemists, material scientists, bioengineers and marine biologists all working together to develop effective solutions for coral reefs. This creates a unique environment to develop cutting-edge technologies. So, for instance, we create artificial reefs and these artificial reefs are made in a way that they can enhance the recruitment of baby corals to these structures. We develop nanoparticles that capture the smell of healthy coral reefs, and then they release that scent back into the environment. This then allows baby corals to navigate and they get attracted to these structures. We can do this in a way that we can help them settle in a safe place, which means that they have a higher chance to survive and help in restocking the larger population.

We also do a lot of field work. We have some projects in the lab, but we do a lot of work in Hawai’i, Fiji, and Costa Rica. At the moment, we are working with colleagues to build an artificial reef in Hawai’i that is 50 meters (164 feet) wide and 100 meters (328 feet) long. 

en: Why did you want to come to Scripps?

DW: There are several reasons why I wanted to come to Scripps. For the research that we do, there's an amazing infrastructure here. We have high-end facilities that are readily available and also it's a very collaborative environment. For the kind of work that we do that fuses aspects of biotechnology and marine biology, I don't think there's a better place to do it, especially with San Diego being a biotech hub and Scripps’ history in marine biology. It’s an amazing combination of tools and resources that you can access here. And personally, I think San Diego is one of the best places to live. There's only a few places in the world where you have an office by the ocean and you can jump out during your lunch break to go surf or swim in the ocean.