The year 2018 was...

… the year where I moved to Boulder, Colorado with my husband Lars and my son Bille to start my Carlsberg fellowship at The Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at University of Colorado, Boulder.

…the year where I, for the first time, could add an award to my CV. I’ve never won anything before - besides from a blue plastic watch when I was 8 - but I was awarded the SCIENCE PhD Prize from University of Copenhagen for best PhD at the Faculty of Science.

… the year where my imposter syndrome has thrived the most, I think. Starting the fellowship I was awarded by the Carlsbergfoundation was nerve wracking in the sense, that I felt “You got the money, now go make some kick ass research”. I remember the first days in my new office - I spent quite some time putting up stuff on my walls to make my office seems like mine, so that I felt at home and safe to start working on something slightly outside my comfort zone. Luckily, as a postdoctoral fellow you have the freedom to pursue your ideas and that helped me a lot to get started. I started working on a Perspective, that got accepted right before Christmas. More to come on this!

… the year I engaged into diversity and general working conditions in academia. This led to a comment in Science “Funding agencies can prevent harassment” written together with my husband Lars, and I’ve gotten involved in establishing the network DANWISE (The Danish Society for Women in Science) which will be launched in the new year. More on this in the new year!

Exciting to see what 2019 will bring!

I have won a prize!! The PhD Prize 2018 from the Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen

I am so very honoured to receive the 2018 PhD award for most outstanding PhD dissertation from the Faculty of Science at University of Copenhagen.

Tuesday I flew to Copenhagen to participate in the ceremony for the annual PhD Graduation Ceremony that was held Friday afternoon in the beautiful auditorium at the Frederiksberg Campus.

I was asked to give a short presentation on the main findings of my thesis, and this is the first talk I’ve given where I’ve solely showed photos. This has always been something I’ve wanted to do. Simply showing beautiful photos while telling a capturing story is to me the most interesting way to communicate your research. And beautiful photos of a changing Arctic combined with impressive and colourful photos of the Greenlandic deltas constitute a good background for a good story.

The main findings of my thesis in two lines:

“In my PhD I showed, that the deltas of Greenland react completely opposite of the remaining coasts in the Arctic and the worlds deltas, when climate is warming; They grow bigger!”

Read more about it HERE

Vacation 2018 Rocky Mountains

Since we just moved to the US in Spring this year, we thought why not spend our summer vacation in the area and get to know the “local” mountains better. We live in Boulder, Colorado which has mountains in its backyard - For this vacation we wanted to go a bit further away into the Rockies…. 

So, we decided to do some car camping just North of Rocky Mountain National Park. With a four-year old, we need to plan for great places to cool off during the day - preferably also with space enough for a good soccer match too. We did a rather thorough job in finding some great places beforehand, where we could do ‘dispersed camping’, meaning we could camp there without booking a site in advance and instead just camp whereever we wanted without getting in trouble with the rangers.

We spent one night close to the tree-line south of Red Feather Lake, followed by a night at The Lost Lake - where we also celebrated my son Billes fourth birthday. Presents, flowers and sweets for breakfast made up a good start to his day! Our final night in tent was spent at a beautiful place with a river running by and we had the pleasure of being woken up by a moose grazing outside our tent!!

I keep being amazed by the similarities parts of the landscape has with North-East Greenland, once you get up high enough - though the flora and fauna here in The Rockies is much much more diverse and green. My son knows I work in Greenland, and since he hasn't been yet, it's nice to show him a landscape that in many ways resembles Greenland. I’m planning on bringing him with me for next field season in Greenland.

New publication: Letter in Science

Funding agencies can prevent harassment

In Science this week, I've written a letter together with Lars Lønsmann Iversen as a response to the vast amount of stories and research on harassment in academia. Editorials and #metoo-stories - predominantly told by women - have revealed that experiences with unsafe working environments, inapropriate behavior, harassment and sexual assaults are widespread within science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

The letter proposes that funding agencies have the power to be a part of this highly necessary shift in the academic culture. By incorporating code of conducts for acceptable behavoir from their grant recipients, they are forced to integrate safety standards into grant proposals. 

The broad spectrum of players involved in science should all participate to create an inclusive and responsible culture to ensure a safe workspace in academia. 

Read the Article HERE

Post doc funding from Carlsbergfoundation

Yep, my postdoc grant comes from a beer company! - or the story is as it's written on the webpage "The Carlsberg Foundation is one of the world’s oldest industrial foundations. Here, ambitious brewing enterprise blossoms side by side with research and support for the finest science, art and culture". The foundation supports basic scientific research within the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. 

I've received two years of funding to focus on my research at University of Colorado, Boulder at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. I will work on the PROGLAKE project to investigate the role of proglacial lakes in Greenland on landscape dynamics. 

Luckily, my husband Lars Lønsmann Iversen has received money from the foundation as well! So we're currently one big happy family - pretty busy preparing for a big change though!

AGU FALL MEETING 2017

At this years AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans, I'll be presenting the work, we published in Nature earlier in October this year. 

The title of my poster is 'Delta progradation in Greenland driven by increasing glacial mass loss' in the Cryosphere session C31A 'Arctic Coastal Dynamics: Processes, Rates, and Spatial Variability Posters' - Wednesday 13, December in the morning session.

Writing a Nature paper with your boyfriend

In late 2015, during my PhD, I couldn't get rid of this idea I've had since I started the position in summer 2012. Eventually, I kept talking so much about it, that my boyfriend Lars Lønsmann Iversen, who was also doing his PhD at the time, started to give me so many great inputs to things I (which later became WE....) could do - AND that's how I ended up sharing a first-authorship with my boyfriend. For almost two years, we've worked on this paper together with friends and colleagues. 

It has been quite a ride - and I wont hesitate to do it again. 

The long and winding submitting phase requires beer and licorice

Submitting 40-something documents

Read Lars' version of the whole process on his webpage www.lifeinmud.com

New publication: NATURE paper about the deltas of Greenland

October 5, 2017 was a great day - It was the day, the paper I first-authored was published in Nature. 

Here's Editor Michael White's summary of our work:

"Climate change has the potential to erode coastlines, for example as a result of increased wave activity, but the net effect depends on the balance between creative and destructive forces. Mette Bendixen and colleagues show that deltas in southwestern Greenland have grown over the past few decades, following a period of stability in the mid-twentieth century. The delta expansions occurred during periods of reduced sea ice and increased melt from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Although many coastlines remain under threat, these findings reveal the intimate interactions that arise in a warming climate. A loss of ice seems to lead to increased sediment delivery, which has resulted in the expansion, rather than degradation, of Greenland's deltas."

You can read the article HERE

ZACKENBERG, NE GREENLAND - September 2017

In september, I visited the fantastic Zackenberg research station in NE Greenland for two weeks. My latest visit was in 2013, where I collected data for my PhD. 

The purpose of this years fieldwork was to investigate beach-ridge plains in the Young Sound Fjord and collect ground penetrating radar (GPR) data and sediment for optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) datings. With this, we want to establish relative sea-level curves for the Northeastern part of Greenland.