Andreas Born, congratulations on completing the TMS Starting Grant!

Andreas Born received the TMS Starting Grant in 2016. He was already well acquainted with the climate research environment in Bergen since he obtained his doctorate at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in 2010. He then worked for six years as a postdoctoral fellow in Bern, Switzerland, before returning to UiB.

Born has now completed his TMS Starting Grant project and is employed as an associate professor for Climate dynamics and Paleoclimate at UiB’s Department of Earth Science.

The TMS project succeeded in building a new model for ice sheets that explicitly represents individual layers of accumulation and how they move through the ice in time. The researchers demonstrated how this new approach can be used to minimize uncertainty in simulations of the Greenland ice sheet, paving the way toward improved simulations of past and future sea level. In parallel, the research group also developed a model for the surface mass balance of glaciers and ice sheets, the Bergen Snow Simulator (BESSI). While different in scope, both models follow the same philosophy: to build innovative numerical tools that enable collaboration across disciplinary divides and thus provide answers to previously infeasible research questions.

Born received a FRIPRO project from the Research Council of Norway in 2020, which enabled the research group to expand with two post-docs and a research fellow. Two more research fellows and one additional post-doc are funded through collaborative grants, where Born acts as project or work package leader. The group has maintained active cooperation with collaborators in Canada, the USA, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. An exciting collaboration with the Institute for Comparative Politics was also established in recent years: Born’s research group received funding to investigate whether land areas that were until recently covered by glaciers can be used to generate more renewable energy. This project is carried out together with former TMS winner Professor Yvette Peters. Born and Peters are supervisors for a joint research fellow in the project.

Born was hired as an associate professor in 2021 and writes in his final report that he is grateful for the scientific and administrative freedom that the TMS Starting Grant grant gave him. The freedom combined with the security of the TMS Starting Grant led him to accept the position at UiB and bring his family with him to Bergen.

 

Andreas Born has also achieved the following results during the TMS Starting Grant funding period:

• 2 PhD fellows defended their dissertations during the project period despite the challenges the COVID 19 pandemic brought for their research plans

• The research group published 15 peer-reviewed articles in international journals related to the TMS project (status 2022)

• Born’s research group was awarded several projects, including a FRIPRO project from the Research Council of Norway in 2021

 

Project title: Modeling Englacial Layers and Tracers in Ice Sheets (MELT)

TMS contribution 10 MNOK