University of Oldenburg

Hi.

So Helmut is not only our HRF&B director, he's also a professor at the University of Oldenburg, professor of plankton ecology, and is also leading that working group over there.

That's true.

Yeah.

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.

I think the other would be the importance of considering education at three different levels.

I'm indebted to my colleague, Professor Olav Zavakirukta from Oldenburg University, who highlights the importance of thinking about education from macro, meso and micro perspectives.

And what we tried to do during the Takena record is to focus purely on that macro so that we can start influencing the meso and eventually the micro experiences that both learners and teachers have in the classroom or the virtual equivalent.

The third one for me actually is the importance of the student voice.