Hello! My name is Iliana-Vasiliki Ntinou and I am a new PhD student at BIO. 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 the indigenous communities in Greenland. 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. My advisers are Øystein Varpe (UiB), Lars Henrik Smedsrud (UiB) and Torkel Gissel Nielsen (DTU). I look forward to disentangling the processes of this complex system and diving deeper into the field of marine ecology of polar ecosystems.
I originally come from Greece where I studied biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and developed an interest in plankton biodiversity and ecology. 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 Barents Sea and investigated dominant microalgal groups and the physical processes that explain their distribution patterns and origins. Now, I am very eager to start this wonderful PhD journey at BIO!