Congratulations, Judit and Dirk
Ecological research is an extremely competitive field, probably even more competitive than research in other fields because funding is mainly public. In informatics, for example, many companies are willing to invest a significant part of their profits in research to remain at the forefront of innovation. Because of the competition, bad news is generally more common than good news. Obtaining interesting results, having a project funded, publishing an article, is often very hard work. That is why I am particularly pleased to congratulate my colleagues Judit Laufer, PhD student in the P³-project and Dirk Schmeller, PI of the P³ project and the newly awarded GloMEC-project. Congratulating him twice, actually.
First, because Dirk has obtained an Excellence Chair from the Axa Research Foundation. He is now Professor of Mountain Ecology at the Ecole Nationale Polytechnique de Toulouse (France), assigned to EcoLab, where he will continue to devote all his energy to ecological research through the GloMEC project, and to strengthen his collaboration with Dr. Gaël Le Roux, the biogeochemist of P³. Dirk will also be teaching agronomic engineers the mysteries of ecology and the human impact on the environment and its consequences for biodiversity and human society, especially for sensitive ecosystems such as mountain lakes, streams and their surroundings.
Secondly, because at the 13th of June 2019, Dirk received from sprightly INP-President Olivier Simonin, the INP Innov' 2019 Prize for his multidisciplinary research work on mountain ecology.
It was a nice ceremony during which a video summarizing Dirk’s recent work was broadcast (see below).
And because good news never comes alone, I would also like to congratulate Judit Laufer who also won a prize for her poster entitled Effects of environmental changes on microbial community structure in alpine lakes at the conference Fresh Blood for Freshwater held in Tihany. It was the most popular poster of the participants!
Let’s hope that many more good news and prices will follow!
Congratulations again to Judit and Dirk on behalf of all their colleagues