The Board of the Nansen Center has after an open application and thorough evaluation process appointed Dr Sebastian H. Mernild (43) as the Managing director. Dr. Sebastian H. Mernild.: Source: http://www.mernild.comIn agreement with Dr. Mernild he will start as the new Director of the Center from 1^st December 2016.

Dr. Mernild is currently Professor in climate research at Sogn og Fjordane University College in Sogndal. There he is leading the Climate Change and Glaciology Research Group and responsible for the master education in Climate Change Management.

His research expertise covers local, regional, and global modelling for climate studies of the cryosphere. He has been using a wide variety of atmospheric and terrestrial models combined with observations focusing on understanding and simulating climate change interactions related to snow, glacier ice mass-balance and freshwater runoff including water balance research. His research covers the Greenland Ice Sheet and mountain glaciers in Arctic, Antarctic, Patagonia, and the Andes, where he has done extensive fieldwork.

Dr. Mernild was awarded his Ph.D. degree in climate change, glaciology, and hydrology at University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006. In June 2016 he was awarded the doctor scientiarum degree from University of Copenhagen based on his habilitation thesis Water balance from mountain glacier scale to ice sheet scale - with focus on Mittivakkat Gletscher, Southeast Greenland, and the Greenland Ice Sheet.

After his PhD dissertation Dr. Mernild in 2006 he has worked for more than six years in the US. He started as a Post doc at the International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and continued as senior research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. From 2013 to 2016 he was research leader at Centro de Estudios Científicos (CECs) in Valdivia, Chile.

Further information about Dr. Sebastian H. Mernild is found at his homepage.