Rate My Professor Michael Polito

Michael Polito served as Associate Professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College from 2020 to 2024, after joining as Assistant Professor in 2014. He earned a B.S. in Marine Biology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Marine Biology from the same institution in 2012, where his dissertation examined niche partitioning and dietary change in Pygoscelis penguins using stable isotope analysis. Prior to LSU, Polito held a Devonshire Postdoctoral Scholar position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 2012 to 2014 and worked in various roles including biologist and field team leader at NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center and USFWS Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. His research employs stable isotope analysis to investigate food web dynamics, trophic ecology, and responses to environmental change in coastal and marine ecosystems. Key areas include penguin diets and foraging ecology in Antarctica, saltmarsh food webs in Louisiana, invasive species biology such as lionfish, and anthropogenic contaminants like mercury in marine organisms. Polito led the Polito Lab, mentoring numerous graduate and undergraduate students whose theses addressed topics such as drone imagery in saltmarsh food webs, energy subsidies in marshes, mangrove ecosystem services, and climate-driven shifts in penguin diets.

Polito's scholarship includes impactful publications such as McMahon et al. (2019) 'Divergent trophic responses of sympatric penguin species to historic anthropogenic exploitation and recent climate change' in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Michelson et al. (2023) 'Holocene climate change shifted Southern Ocean biogeochemical cycling and predator trophic dynamics' in Limnology and Oceanography; Keppeler et al. (2024) 'Coastal wetland restoration through the lens of Odum's theory of ecosystem development' in Restoration Ecology; and Keppeler et al. (2023) 'Can biodiversity of preexisting and created salt marshes match across scales?' in Ecosphere. He received the LSU Rainmaker Award as an Emerging Scholar in 2018 and the Gulf Research Program Early-Career Research Fellowship from 2015 to 2020. His work has been supported by grants from NSF, NOAA, SeaWorld, and others, contributing to multidisciplinary studies on Antarctic ecosystems, coastal restoration, and marine conservation.