Saint-Petersburg State University awards Honorary Doctorate to AWI director

For his scientific contributions to polar research and his commitment towards cooperation with Russia, Professor Jörn Thiede, director of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Saint-Petersburg State University on May 12, 2004.

Since the early 1990s, Professor Jörn Thiede has been involved in building German-Russian collaboration in education and research. Through the scientific results of his first polar expedition, Thiede recognised the invaluable significance of the Siberian shelf seas as indicators of the development of global climate and of the impacts of potential climate change. Over the past years, an extensive network of German and Russian scientists has been studying jointly the causes and impacts of global climate change in the Siberian Arctic. In October 2001, this cooperation resulted in the establishment of an international Master’s degree programme for applied polar and marine sciences (POMOR) at Saint-Petersburg State University. Russian instructors from Saint-Petersburg University and from Russian research institutions such as the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) contribute to the teaching, as do German colleagues from the Alfred- Wegener-Institute, the University of Bremen and the Hochschulen im Verbund Norddeutscher Universitäten (Consortium of Universities in Northern Germany) (Hamburg, Greifswald, Kiel, Oldenburg, Rostock) as well as from the research centre IFM-GEOMAR. Part of the training takes place at the German-Russian Otto Schmidt Labor (Otto Schmidt Laboratory) (OSL) at the AARI. The collaboration serves all partners in the training and recruitment of young scientists for current and future cooperative projects, and aids the development and intensification of university teaching.

Thiede was born in Berlin in 1941. He studied geology at the Universities of Kiel, Buenos Aires, Vienna and Aarhus and received his doctorate from the University of Kiel in 1971. After having conducted research in Aarhus, Bergen, Corvallis and Oslo, Thiede was appointed Professor of Paleontology and Historical Geology at the University of Kiel in 1982. There, he instigated several initiatives for marine geological research in high northern latitudes, based on his expertise as leader of the marine geological working group of the swedish YMER-80 expedition. This was followed by the first Arctic Ocean expeditions of the new German research icebreaker “Polarstern”, and culminated in the 1991 expedition to the North Pole and in the first sediment core drilling in the northern polar seas in 1993. Thiede became the first director of the new research centre for marine geosciences (GEOMAR) founded in Kiel in 1987. Subsequently he was appointed director of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven in 1997.

Professor Thiede has been honoured for his scientific work with many national and international awards, e.g. with the "Leibniz Preis der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft" ('Leibniz Prize of the German Research Council') in 1988, with the "Verdienstkreuz am Bande des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland" ('Cross of Merit on ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany') in 1995, and with foreign membership to the 'Russian Academy of Sciences' in 2003.

Bremerhaven, May 12, 2004