Marine phytoplankton represent a huge proportion of the organic carbon pool on the planet and are thus critical drivers of carbon cycling and ultimately global climate. They inhabit a turbulent world in which their spatial and temporal population distributions are highly patchy, from the meso- to the mico-scales. In this ongoing project, we designed and optimized a liter-scale oscillating grid turbulence facility and developed a novel, non-intrusive means of directly imaging phytoplankton distributions in fluid turbulence based on laser-induced fluorescence (LIF).