Professor Lise Øvreås elected as the new president of EASAC#
Academia Europaea is delighted to announce that Professor Lise Øvreås MAE was elected to take over the presidency of EASAC
to lead the organization from 2026 and the three next years.
About Lise Øvreås#
, Norway. Currently she is also the President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA). She holds a PhD degree in microbiology from the University of Bergen from 1998 and became a full professor in 2007. She was part of the Norwegian Research Funded Center of Excellence (COE) in Geobiology at University of Bergen from 2007 – 2012 where she led the working group “The Deep Biosphere”. Through the CoE she took part in several field works and research cruises in the Arctic Ocean as well as in the Pacific Ocean.
Her research interest is microbial diversity and ecology along environmental gradients. She is specially interested in studying the impact of climate change on microbial communities, including the impact of warming of permafrost soils and glacier ecosystems. She has been involved in Arctic fieldworks and research project for more than 25 years. Øvreås served as the Dean of Research at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at University of Bergen from 2010 – 2014. Since 2016 she has also been Adjunct Professor at University Center in Svalbard
(UNIS) responsible for Arctic Microbiology course. From 2019 – 2021 she was the Academic director for Ocean Sustainability Bergen (OSB) a multidisciplinary research center to provide research for a sustainable Ocean. The overall goal was to strengthen the science-policy interface and to ensure that political decisions are better informed by science. OSB administered the university’s status as SDG14 Hub for United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) and leading the SDG14 cluster for the International Association of Universities (IAU), heading a consortium of ten world-leading marine universities to engage with the 2030 agenda.
Lise Øvreås was elected as member of the Ecology and Evolution section of Academia Europaea in 2022.
About EASAC#
EASAC provides independent science-based advice for policymakers on important challenges for Europe.
EASAC brings together the National Academies of Science of the EU Member States, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, as well as Academia Europaea (a pan-European Academy) and ALLEA (the federation of all academies in geographical Europe) to provide independent science advice to European policymakers. EASAC was founded in 2001 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
EASAC’s main mission is to inform both national and European Union policymakers on evidence to take policy decisions – on questions of relevance regarding environment, energy, biosciences and public health. EASAC’s views are independent of commercial or political bias, and follow open and transparent processes to arrive at science-based analysis and recommendations.
EASAC is also part of a global network of science academies: As the regional affiliated member for Europe of the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), EASAC is closely connected to – and collaborates with – (regional networks of) national science academies across the world.
