Prof. Dr. Antje Boetius
Since 01. November 2017 Prof. Boetius is the director of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). The deep-sea researcher is also Professor of Geomicrobiology at the University of Bremen. Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1967, Antje Boetius studied Biological Oceanography in Hamburg and San Diego from 1986-1992 and earned her doctorate in 1996 on deep-sea microbiology. From 2003 to 2008, after spending time at various marine research institutes, she established a working group on the study of microbial habitats in the ocean at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. Since the end of 2008, she has also been the director of the Helmholtz-Max Planck Bridge Group for Deep-Sea Ecology and Technology at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven and on the board of the Cluster of Excellence MARUM of the University of Bremen. 2009 Antje Boetius received the highly endowed Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. Since 2010, she has been a member of the German Science Council and, since 2013, the chair of his Scientific Committee. Antje Boetius has participated in 45 expeditions on international research vessels and is currently focusing on issues of climate change impacts on the biogeochemistry and biodiversity of the Arctic Ocean. She recently received the ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, as well as a number of prestigious awards at home and abroad. In 2011, she published a comprehensive non-fiction book “The Dark Paradise” about deep sea exploration together with her father, writer Henning Boetius.