The University of Alaska Fairbanks has named PIK´s Jürgen Kurths to the Sydney Chapman Endowed Chair of Physical Sciences. The chair is a faculty position in UAF’s College of Natural Science and Mathematics and is traditionally held by researchers who are pioneers in the physical sciences. Kurths also accepted a position as Honorary Professor at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China, thereby strengthening the good scientific exchange with Chinese experts.
Since November 2016, Anne Biewald is a deputy professor for agricultural and environmental politics at the University of Gießen. At PIK, she continues to coordinate the project SUSTAg (Assessing options for the sustainable intensification of agriculture for integrated production of food and non-food products at different scales). Biewald also co-chairs a new transdisciplinary and international research group on Water Management in the Future Earth Framework.
Hagen Koch, who works on hydrological modelling and impact assessment at PIK, received a visiting professorship at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) in Recife, Brazil, for four months. The visiting professorship is one of the final achievements of the Brazilian-German research project INNOVATE.
Dieter Gerten, who coordinates Earth modelling at PIK and whose research interests focus on global water resources and ecosystems under climate change, joined the ranks of PIK professors at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He is now a professor for Global Change Climatology and Hydrology (Klimasystem und Wasserhaushalt im Globalen Wandel) at its Geography Department, his inaugural lecture will take place on May 23.
