Category: news

Tom has started his position as a postdoctoral fellow at the NTNU in Trondheim. In this role, he will be taking over the coordinating responsibilities of the NordBorN network, allowing Mariana Verdonen to focus more on her research during the final months of her contract.

Tom completed his PhD at the University of Vienna, Austria, where his work focused on modelling biological invasions in the sub-Antarctic region. He assessed the risk that plant invasions pose for these isolated islands under climate change, and how their past and current shipping network links them to potential alien plants on the mainland. Prior to this, he worked in the Austrian Alps documenting the distribution of alien plant species along rivers and roads, as well as conducting ethnobotanical research on the famine food consumed during the Dutch famine of 1944-45. He is interested in polar and alpine flora, biological invasions, history, and species dynamics under climate change.

Last week, on October 6-8, Mariana and Isabel visited Anne in Gothenburg to work on the resubmission of a funding application to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Networks 2025 call. This ambitious grant would fund a cohort of 14 doctoral candidates to work on borealization-related research. In addition to many NordBorN researchers this grant also involves the participation of many non-academic partners.

We are happy to welcome our new PhD researchers, Charlotte Wagner and Hans Meinhard í Eyðansstovu!

Charlotte began her PhD in October at the Agricultural University of Iceland. She has a degree in agricultural engineering with a specialisation in ecology and conservation of natural environments, which she obtained at the Institut Agro Dijon in France. Her PhD project aims to investigate how coexisting wild (reindeer, pink-footed goose) and domestic(sheep) herbivores partition food resource across different ecological and management context. To better understand the interspecific relationships and  identify potential competition between these herbivores, she will describe their diet composition and quality, as well as the availability of food resources to provide tools for grazing management.

Hans Meinhard recently started his PhD at the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim. He got his bachelor in Biological Ecology at the University of the Faroe Islands, after which he went on to take a masters in Biodiversity and Systematics (NABiS) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He’s interested in the flora of Nordic, Arctic and Alpine regions where his main research interests are within Invasion Biology, Systematics and Biogeography. In his PhD work, Hans Meinhard is working on a project uncovering the genomic secrets behind the invasion of Barbarea vulgaris, an alien species in the Arctic.