Bringing museum specimens back into the light: Meet the new postdoctoral researcher molecularly exploring museum collections

Rita M. Austin, a recent addition to the FEZ group, is working as a postdoctoral researcher exploring and optimizing the recovery of museum biomolecules in the Oslo Natural History Museum collections. Rita completed her PhD earlier this year at the University of Oklahoma, where she conducted meta- and […]

Assessing biodiversity in the marine algae belt

The marine algae belt comprising kelp forests, seagrass meadows and rocky reefs with coralline red seaweeds is one of the most active primary producing environments in the sea. It also harbors are great diversity of animals including sea squirts, ribbon worms, nick worms, serpulid worms, spionid worms and […]

Did the vikings bring beetles along to Iceland?

Vetle started his MSc-project in the late parts of 2018, and continued with fieldwork in Iceland, Scotland, Norway and the Faroes. The goal of the thesis is to determine where the beetle fauna of Iceland originated from. With a thorough sampling from the northern parts of Europe, he […]

The wrong food chain

Plastic pollution has become a major threat to many marine ecosystems, and there is a need for an improved understanding of its impact on marine organisms. The Masters thesis of Gordon Breckwoldt entitled “Elasmobranchs as bioindicators? A comparative study on ingestion of plastics in the Nordic region” aimed at quantifying […]

Natural history collections in the molecular era

Public outreach is an important task for scientists, not only for those based at natural history museums. FEZ researchers aim at disseminating relevant topics relating to the group’s research interests to the public. In 2020, José, Torsten and Lutz published together with our colleague Arild Johnsen from the […]

A new PhD student in town

This year in September Alberto Valero-Gracia started has a new PhD student in our group. After completing a Bachelor + MSc degree at University Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) he worked as a Marie Curie researcher at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (Italy). Throughout his time in Spain and […]

Summer project at rocky shores

Liepa Adomaityte, a Bachelor student associated with FEZ group, did her 2020 summer project studying speciation in a group of intertidal beetles distributed on both sides of the Northern Pacific. The (sub)genus Neochthebius (see photo of N. yoshitomii) is the only Northern Hemisphere lineage in the family Hydraenidae […]

The first defense

The FEZ group has only recently been established and hence so far we had no PhD student graduating from our group. This year was the premiere. Jose successfully defended his thesis with much appraisal by his opponents. Given the circumstances of this year it was a digital one […]

The first door of the calendar

This year the FEZ group got a new FRIPRO project funded by the NFR called “InvertOmics – Phylogeny and evolution of lophotrochozoan invertebrates based on genomic data”. The project includes many members from FEZ (Alberto, James, Lutz and Torsten), other researchers at the NHM and international collaborators. So […]