Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research

And my guest this month is Dr. Boris Dorschel.

He's the head of the bathymetry working group at the Alfred Wegener Institute and leader of the Southern Ocean Regional Center for the Seabed 2030 program.

project

so boris

But I never thought it could be actually a job.

So...

So for any listeners who don't know about RV, can you describe a little bit about what the Alfred Wegener Institute is and how this Helmholtz system works?

Yes, absolutely.

With you or?

I was the coordinator, and in addition to Ollenburg, we had, for example, already the Alfred Wegener Institute as one of our strategic partners for this application.

And to the big surprise of many, I would say, the mid-sized University of Ollenburg actually made it to the final round of four applications that were then competitively reviewed.

And our application had one major difference to all the other applications, and that is it was the only one where terrestrial and marine biodiversity played roughly equal roles.

But a few years later, must have been 2015 or so, the then director of Alfred Wegner, which was Karin Lochte, contacted me and said, Helmut, I'm seeing what's going on there in Leipzig is really great, but for obvious reasons, there's actually no marine component in there.

So shouldn't we kind of revive our ideas and see whether we can build something without... external funding from our own resources.

So the first idea we actually had was not so much building a new institute, but actually bringing the biodiversity researchers from Alfred Wegener Institute, Essen Helmholtz Center and the University of Oldenburg together.

And while we were thinking about this and discussing both with the different ranks at the university, There was an announcement by the Helmholtz Society asking for bids for new Helmholtz Institutes.