Maarten Boersma took over as acting director of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) on May 1.
The biologist has been conducting research since 2001, primarily at the stations on Heligoland and Sylt, and has held a management position since 2015. He has been a member of the AWI Directorate since summer 2024. Maarten Boersma succeeds Antje Boetius, who is moving to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California as President.
As head of the Coastal Ecology Section at the Alfred Wegner Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Boersma is concerned with the effects of climate change and other stressors on plankton communities in the North Sea. He is the spokesperson for the topic Coastal Zones at a Time of Global Change in the current research program, so he is well connected at the AWI as well as in the German and international scientific community. In addition to the North Sea, Maarten Boersma also researches other coastal systems, for example in the northern Canadian Arctic together with colleagues from the AWI in Potsdam.
“I was delighted when I was asked to take over as interim director of the AWI,” says Boersma. “Before accepting, I consulted with the members of the Directorate and the staff in my section. I’m glad that my deputy section head Dr. Sabine Horn supports me, as do our administrative director Dr. Karsten Wurr and the two deputy directors Prof. Dr. Thomas Jung and Dr. Uwe Nixdorf. This allows me to take on the diverse tasks at AWI, in the Helmholtz Association and the many networks in which we are involved with pleasure.”
“AWI is on the right track”
“I am very much looking forward to this new way of working with Maarten Boersma in the Center’s management. I appreciate him for the goal-oriented, hands-on and positive way in which he tackles tasks,” said AWI Administrative Director Karsten Wurr. The institute is on the right track: at the end of March 2025, the center’s research program was evaluated very positively as part of the Helmholtz Association’s program-oriented funding (POF IV).
“From summer 2025, we will be working on the draft of our research program for the next POF V funding period. I am sure that we will design an ambitious and exciting program with the dedicated AWI staff,” says Boersma, explaining an upcoming task. “I hope that the AWI will be able to further expand its outstanding expertise as a leading international institute in polar and marine research. I would like to thank Antje Boetius most sincerely for her tireless efforts over the past seven years: the outstanding evaluation results show convincingly how successfully she has advanced the AWI. We wish her many exciting discoveries and much success at MBARI.”
Boersma is an aquatic ecologist and has worked in both freshwater and marine environments. After completing his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 1994 on the population dynamics of the freshwater crustacean Daphnia (“water flea”), he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Plön, Germany. Here he investigated the effects of various aspects of nutrition on the dynamics of zooplankton. He began teaching at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and received his venia legendi in 2001. He was appointed Apl. Prof. at the same university in 2006.
He then moved to the Alfred Wegener Institute, Biological Institute Helgoland, and continued his research on the effects of various stress factors on planktonic communities now in the marine environment. In 2012, Boersma was appointed Professor of Experimental Coastal Ecology at the University of Bremen. He was a member of the steering committee of the Bioacid projects on the effects of ocean acidification on marine communities and is now involved in research into the ecological effects of alkalinity increase as a measure to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
