Antje Boetius - Biography#

Antje Boetius is Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center of Marine and Polar Research; Germany’s national polar research center. She is Professor of Geomicrobiology at the University Bremen, and leader of a joint research group on Deep Sea Ecology and Technology with the Alfred Wegener Institute at the Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology.

She has studied Biology and Biological Oceanography at the University of Hamburg and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her PhD thesis dealt with deep-sea microbiology and biogeochemistry. She became Professor for Microbiology in 2001 at the Jacobs University in Bremen, and was Group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology from 2003-2008.

Antje Boetius is an expert of marine biogeochemistry, biological oceanography, deep-sea biology and microbial of the ocean. She works on polar seas, on chemosynthetic ecosystems and other extreme habitats of the ocean. Antje Boetius has lead or participated in over 45 expeditions, and she has coordinated many national and international research programs. Antje Boetius and her team are renowned for their contributions to microbe-microbe interactions with a focus on the anaerobic oxidation of methane. Key areas of her research include the diversity and function of life associated with seafloor processes such as pelagobenthic coupling, gas seepage and fluid flow, and the structure, function and dynamics of microbial communities of the ocean floor. Current studies of the group include the exploration of Arctic deep-sea life under the ice, and the long-term observation of the effects of global warming on polar ecosystems.

Antje Boetius has been awarded with the Medaille de la Societe d’Oceanographie de France, the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize of the German Science Foundation, the Advanced Grant of the European Research Council among many other honors. Antje Boetius has been elected as an external scientific member of the Max Planck Society, to the German National Academy Leopoldina (Section Geology), and to the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz as well as two European academies. She is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the American Academy of Microbiology. Antje engages much in public outreach and transfer of knowledge from ocean sciences, she is the leader of the steering committee of "Science in Dialogue", an initiative of Germany’s science organizations to improve science communication with society.