Thank you! It is with a some sadness, but also a certain degree of relief I write this. When I announced my retirement at the Christmas party last winter, the rumors said that the Head of Department function should either be centralized to a new unit within the faculty, or outsourced to a call center…
Author: andersg
2016 - Week 24, Dagens leder, Fra toppen
Fra Toppen: Almost summer!
by andersg • • 0 Comments
Another lovely but busy early summer week nearing its close. It is the time of master exams and disputations at the department, and many small and big things must be coordinated. Fortunately BIO has talented people in every position who makes this glide smoothly and without pain. Yesterday was especially busy for my part, with leader meeting in the morning, end of term celebration for lunch, opening of the NMR facility in the Workshop Building in the afternoon, and summer dinner with faculty in Knut Fægris house in the evening. Hectic but enjoyable. Thanks for all the gifts, fine words and a brilliant event with bubbles and tapas in the Japanese garden! Special thanks to Nina, Eva, Rebecca, Ingunn, Synnøve og Lise who organized the great event.
Then we must congratulate Jeppe Kolding with promotion to full professor, with effect from September 2015. Well deserved! The Faculty Board also decided to appoint Ida Helene Steen as associate professor in geomicrobiologi. Congratulations and welcome, Ida! Welcome also to Ståle Ellingsen, who has accepted the position as associate professor in fish anatomy.
Somewhat more worrying is it that the Faculty Board adopted a statement which may result in further centralization of administrative functions already in the September meeting, long before both the Scenario 2030 group has concluded and before the new HR organization at the faculty has been evaluated. This would then be contrary to the wishes of most groups, who points out that the overall structure should find its form before making other organizational changes. What’s the rush?
This week’s level 2 publication is an article about stickleback ecological adaptations in BMC Evolutionary Biology with Tom Olav Klepaker as coauthor. Congratulations!
Regards Anders
2016 - Week 23, Dagens leder, Fra toppen
Fra Toppen: Social relevance
by andersg • • 0 Comments
Social relevance Making social relevance of education clearer to students is one of the ambitions BIO has through its own strategy and in bioCEED. We do this by connecting the workplace into our study programs, as lecturers and seminar participants, and with internships and projects related to management, NGOs and the private sector. In some…
2016 - Week 22, Dagens leder, Fra toppen
Fra Toppen – Week 22: Deadlines
by andersg • • 0 Comments
By the deadline of the Research Council of Norway 25th of May, 1731 applications had been submitted. Of these, 1271 went to the FRIPRO programme. From BIO, 19 applications were submitted to FRIPRO, of these 12 researcher applications, three mobility stipends and two Young Research Talent applications. In addition, four applications were sent to KLIMAFORSK, three to INTPART, and one to the UTNAM programme. As usual, EECRG is the most active research group, coordinating 10 applications.
This year we have tried a new model, where the applicants have been invited to present their ideas for each other and for a panel of BIO’s more experienced scientists, who have also read the applications and given advice on the project descriptions. We hope and believe that this has improved the quality of the applications sent by the deadline, and that more projects will succeed in getting through the eye of the needle.
It isn’t the number that counts, in fact. And maybe these fixed deadlines are contributing to the generation of more half-good applications, and hence more waste of time, both for the scientists and the evaluation panel, than necessary. An attempt by the National Science Foundation in USA to get rid of the enormous heaps of applications at certain times of the year indicates that it is so.
Since NSF introduced open deadlines for some of its programmes in 2011, the number of applications has been halved. It can seem like it is the half-motivated and sloppy prepared applications that disappear, while the good applications are improved through better preparation and time for polishing.
Another advantage with open deadlines is that fixed deadlines always seem to fit poorly for most people, and especially for university scientists. The May deadline comes at the time of exams and submission of master theses. The September deadline comes just after semester start, student receptions, and is often written at the time when foreign collaborators have their holiday.
Maybe time to skip deadlines also for the Research Council?
Monday this week the Norwegian Ocean Laboratory was opened at Marineholmen. Both rector Dag Rune Olsen, IMR director Sissel Rogne, and Prime Minister Erna Solberg were present when it was also announced that the KG Jebsen Foundation will fund a KG Jebsen Center for Deep Ocean Research, lead by Rolf Birger Pedersen at CGB, and with our own Hans Tore Rapp on the team. Congratulations to everyone involved!
Congratulations also to Richard Telford and coauthors on a level 2 publication in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Hilsen Anders
2016 - Week 21, Dagens leder, Fra toppen
Fra Toppen: New leader in place
by andersg • • 0 Comments
New leader in place Then the Faculty Board has appointed my successor. In its extraordinary meeting this Wednesday Ørjan Totland was appointed as new Head of Department of BIO. It is reported that he already has accepted the position. Ørjan is a biologist from Bergen with his master and doctoral thesis from the former Botanical…
May spurt
After a long week-end with Whitsun and 17th of May celebrations, a finishing spurt is coming up in several areas. The students are reading for exams or writing master theses for submission. Supervisors are reading and correcting and some will be censoring until late summer. May 25 is the deadline to the Research Council, where at least 14 applicants, that we know of, are working on project applications for FRIPRO, the open programmes of NFR.
This year we are trying a new model, where the applicants have been invited to present their ideas for each other and for a panel of BIO’s more experienced scientists, who will also read the applications and give advice on the project descriptions. We hope and believe that this can improve the quality of the applications sent by the deadline, and that more projects will succeed in getting through the eye of the needle. Many thanks to those involved!
It isn’t the number that counts, in fact. And maybe these fixed deadlines are contributing to the generation of more half-good applications, and hence more waste of time, both for the scientists and the evaluation panel, than necessary. An attempt by the National Science Foundation in USA to get rid of the enormous heaps of applications at certain times of the year indicates that it is so.
Since NSF introduced open deadlines for some of its programmes in 2011, the number of applications has been halved. It can seem like it is the half-motivated and sloppy prepared applications that disappear, while the good applications are improved through better preparation and time for polishing.
Another advantage with open deadlines is that fixed deadlines always seem to fit poorly for most people, and especially for university scientists. The May deadline comes at the time of exams and submission of master theses. The September deadline comes just after semester start, student receptions, and is often written at the time when foreign collaborators have their holiday.
Maybe time to skip deadlines also for the Research Council?
Hilsen Anders
2016 - Week 19, Dagens leder, Fra toppen
Fra Toppen: Media habits and information flow – Week 19
by andersg • • 0 Comments
While a well-known mathematics professor is sailing around the world, and in the newspaper columns, the Nordic Media Days are organized these days in Bergen. Among other things, people’s media habits have been investigated through the annual Media survey. From this it appears that the public’s trust in media has been decreasing lately. At the same time, cellulose-based newspapers struggle with their income, when the young generation with more digital media habits enters adulthood.
It is a while since BIO-info came out on paper. The last years our annual newsletter has been distributed as a pdf link. Starting this winter we have moved to a blog based edition, making it much simpler for us to edit stories and publish useful information for BIO employees and others who want to be informed about what is going on. In this way we also avoid spamming everyone with e-mails every time important things that we need to inform about appear. At the same time, two energetic PhD fellows contribute with editing, and thereby obtain both media training and useful acitvity in their compulsory work hours.
We have received positive feed-back on this transition. I am still a bit concerned that the new format doesn’t reach out as well as before. Some people note that the blog format doesn’t give the same oversight as the linear pdf format. It takes some clicking to get into the different topics, and clicking may lead to loosing the thread and not finding your way back to where you started. We also experience that information isn’t received as well as it used to do.
When the new BIO-info now starts to settle, it may be time for our own little survey of media habits. Thus we can find out what we can do better to make sure that everyone gets the information that can be found in BIO-info’s boxes and columns. Anyone with ideas or suggestions are welcome to send them to the editorial office.
A scientific journal in biology that has been digital since its incetion, and which over just a couple of years has established itself as a well recognized and respected journal, is eLife. Even though eLife itself is critical to the of an impact factor as a measure of scientific quality, the journal has in a short time approached an IF of 10. eLife is still at level 1 in the Norwegian system, but this is deemd to change now that Norwegian scientists start to discover the journal. The last in this regard is Arild Folkvord, who together with colleagues from among other places Uppsala, has mapped the herring genome and its importance for ecological adaptations. Congratulations to Arild!
Referring to the afore-mentioned mathematics professor, we are obviously many who were surprised to the way the University leadership presented a sailing professor as a normal and wanted way to be employed. It mus be obvious that the normal situation we want is faculty members who are present at the department and the institution and contribute to the scientific environment through research, discussions and smalltalk, supervision, outreach and teaching. And then of course we expect our staff to travel and visit other scientific environments, participate at conferences and contribute with guest lectures and courses. The work efforts of a professor is counted in many more ways than the number of articles published alone.
Happy 17. May!
Hilsen Anders
Marine start-up
The University of Bergen Board decided Thursday that the marine initiative of the University will be handled by the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Let us hope and believe that this will be a manifestation of the potential for marine activities across discipline borders both within and outside the faculty.
The two largest new projects at BIO (except from centre projects) are also marine. Last week the SpongES project (Horizon 2020) coordinated by Hans Tore Rapp had its kick-off meeting. This week it was the dCod 1.0 project (Digital Life, NRC) led by myself that was kicked off. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between biologists, bioinformaticians, and mathematicians is providing exciting opportunities, but also challenges in learning to know and understand each other when we want to speak science with each other.
This week’s list of level 2 publications contains four articles. That is a number we would like to see more often. We congratulate John Birks and Hilary Birks with a paper in New Phytologist, Joachim Töpper, Vigdis Vandvik and coauthors in Global Change Biology, Håkon Dahle and more in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems, and Arne Skorping, Knut Helge Jensen, Adele Mennerat and Göran Högstedt who landed an exciting story in American Naturalist.
Hilsen Anders
Super student application numbers for BIO!
Tuesday this week the numbers from this year’s student applications were revealed by the Norwegian Universities and Colleges Admission Services (Samordna opptak). It is clear that the students have observed that the petroleum age is on the wane, and that the bioeconomy represents the future. Both petroleum technology and the programmes in geosciences experience a continued decline from last year, and have for the first time fewer students than study places . This is a dramatic situation.
For the BIO programmes the trend is opposite and extremely positive. For the bachelor programme in biology we have 142 first priority applicants to 75 study places, vs 113 applicants last year. The integrated master programme in aquamedicine (fish health), which was expanded to 25 study places last year, has 58 priority applicants (normally thirty-some). And the brand-new integrated master (siving.) programme in aquaculture and seafood has 52 applicants to 15 study places. Also the environment and resource management programme (natural science direction) has relatively many applicants (26) to 15 study places. This is really marvelous, and implies that we for the first time ever (I think) may have a grade point limit for all our study programmes.
It is especially encouraging and interesting that the demand for R2-maths applied to the siving-programme didn’t scare the students away. As we know, the ministry has plans to introduce compulsory R2 math competence for all science programmes, including biology, over a couple of years. This means that math competence has to be introduced to students all the way from elementary school, or even kindergarten. Here a vigorous effort is needed, if we are to have a sufficient number of students with R2 competence to fill the biology programmes in the future.
The week has also lead to other interesting acitivites for myself: (1) start of construction of the National Algae Pilot facility at Mongstad, duly published in both local TV and press, (2) opening conference for the Center for Digital Life in Trondheim, and (3) the faculty’s spring seminar at Solstrand. Here the highlight was PhD fellow Sunniva Rose’s talk on pink blogs and nuclear physics.
This week also saw the publication of the salmon genom in Nature, a long term project finally concluded and made public, with important contributions from the bioinformatics environment in Bergen, among others with Inge Jonassen among the coauthors. We also saw a level 2 publication from BIO this week, by Alexander Otterlei, Daniel Jensen, Are Nylund and coauthors in BMC Veterinary Medicine. Congratulations to all of them!
Hilsen Anders
A new level in the Academic Council for Biology
Last week the Academic Council for Biology (Biofagrådet) was assembled in the Tårnbygningen at Ås. NMBU were the hosts for the meeting, which includes representatives of biology from most universities in Norway, under the umbrella of the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions (UHR). Both NTNU, NMBU, and UiB are represented by two departments. From Bergen, the Department of Molecular Biology (MBI), and BIO are represented. In addition, UiO (Oslo), UiS (Stavanger), UiT (Tromsø) and Nord University (Bodø) are members of Biofagrådet. The meetings of the Council is an important opportunity to exchange experiences and discuss strategic issues in biology with colleagues from the other Norwegian universities. This is also the forum where each year we discuss which scientific journals should be lifted to level 2 of the Biology list of the Norwegian publication system. This discussion takes place in the fall.
This time the whole Academic Council was lifted to a new level, through the establishment of an Educational Forum, on initiative from bioCEED, under the Council (see photo). The Educational Forum will be a forum where educational leaders in biology can meet with the objective to drive development of biology education and exchange experiences between universities. Øystein Varpe from UNIS (and bioCEED) presented the idea to the Council. Øyvind Fiksen from BIO (and bioCEED) and Tom Andersen from Department of Biosciences (UiO) presented their experiences as educational leaders at their resepective departments. The Educational Forum is obviously a good and timely initiative, and we will most certainly here more from this in the future.
Next week we organize our own Strategy seminar in the Aula with interesting presentations and important discussions. Save Thursday April 14, and register here, if you didn’t do so already.
Hilsen Anders