Five young researchers receive a total of 103 million NOK, approximately 11.3 million Euros from the the Bergen Research Foundation.
Andreas Born is one of them, currently researcher in Switzerland under professor Thomas Stocker. In 2010 Born defended his thesis ”Ocean circulation and climate at the Eemian and last glacial inception” at the UiB and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research under supervision by Kerim Nisanciolgu.
Back in Bergen Andreas Born will establish a new research group at the Department of Earth Science on the topic of ice sheet and climate dynamics.
“The BFS funding offers the truly unique freedom to develop a lasting value both for the local department as well as for the scientific community at large. My group can now put effort into a project that looks beyond the next publication or deliverable to focus on the larger picture. In particular, we aim to build new research tools that enable a new interdisciplinary collaboration between ice sheet modeling and field-going glaciologists. Similar collaborations are a matter of course in other fields of the Earth Sciences such as paleoceanography and ocean modeling, and proved very fruitful for our understanding of the ocean. However, the lack of appropriate methods prevented similar success in glaciology, which is one important reason why sea level projections are more uncertain than they need to be”, Andreas Born writes to the Bjerknes Centre.
In other words the BFS funding enables the development of a novel type of ice sheet model that takes advantage of high-quality reconstructions from the Greenland ice sheet while at the same time being consistent with the physics of ice flow, the uib.no writes.
Excellent family work-life balace
After six years in Switzerland, Andreas Born now brings his family back to Bergen. A tough decision, also to consider among several offers.
“What made us chose Bergen and Norway was an excellent work-life balance for families. Bergen is a beautiful city to raise our kids while at the same time offering the opportunity to realize our personal professional ambitions for my spouse and myself. After my postdoc years and the uncertainty they imply, the security and long-term perspective of the BFS position were important factors” Andreas Born says.
He also emphasizes the work conditions at the UiB and the Bjerknes Centre:
“The excellent existing expertise at GEO and the breadth of research activities and topics at the various institutions of the Bjerknes Centre were very important for my decision to come back here as well.”