One of our new PhD fellows joining the Climate Narratives team is Iliana-Vasiliki Ntinou. In this post she introduces herself.
My name is Iliana-Vasiliki Ntinou, and I am a new PhD student at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Bergen. My PhD is part of the interdisciplinary project Climate Narratives which is about expanding our knowledge and understanding of the impacts of climate change on physical and biological processes as well as its societal consequences for indigenous communities. For the next four years, I will focus on the impact of oceanographic conditions on the seasonal and longer-term dynamics of the plankton community in Disko Bay, Greenland. My advisers are Øystein Varpe (UiB), Lars H. Smedsrud (UiB) and Torkel G. Nielsen (DTU). I look forward to disentangling the processes of this complex system and diving deeper into the field of marine plankton ecology in polar ecosystems.
I am a marine biologist with a keen interest in plankton ecology at polar ecosystems. I originally come from Greece where I studied biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and focused on the biodiversity and abundance of the phytoplankton and zooplankton community at a coastal site of Thermaikos Gulf, Greece. Afterwards, I completed an internship at the Fisheries Research Institute in Greece and took part in monitoring of water quality in Kavala Gulf and Nestos Lagoons. Later on, I obtained my master’s degree in Marine Biology at the University of Bergen. I completed my master thesis as part of the Nansen Legacy project, on the elemental composition of particulate matter in the Northern Barents Sea and investigated dominant microalgal groups and the physical processes that explain their distribution patterns and origins.