Reception in Brest of the FINA Prize Winners

In 2020, the four French institutes in the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) are launching the French Institute Nordic Award (FINA), which aims to promote cultural and scientific cooperation between France and the Nordic countries and to reward outstanding achievements in this field.

FINA award poster

This year, the theme chosen was the ocean and the prize consisted of scientific mobility in Brest. This shows the richness of the ecosystem of the western part of Brittany in the field of marine sciences, in the continuity of the One Ocean Summit.

Who were the winners?

Anna Lund Hermansson is a PhD student at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). She is working on the environmental impacts of shipping, and in particular on scrubbers, exhaust gas cleaning systems installed on ships to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Anna arrived a week early to participate in Sea Tech Week®.

Asal Peydaei is a post-doctoral fellow at the National Museum of Denmark. She is working on marine biotechnology and in particular on the degradation of plastics by biotic and abiotic factors in the marine environment.

Apostolos Tsiouvalas is a PhD student at the University of Tromsø (Norway). He specialises in marine law as applied to Arctic regions.

Rami Eldairi is a post-doctoral fellow at the Finnish Environment Institute SYKE (Finland). He is specialised in toxicology and molecular biology and works on 3 projects: the impact of microplastics, sublethal effects of dumped ammunition in the Baltic Sea, and the impact of underwater noise on aquatic species in the Baltic Sea.

Who did they meet?

The researchers met with experts from Ifremer, IUEM and the Shom. The Campus mondial de la mer team and the Pôle Mer Bretagne Atlantique also enriched their tour of the territory's players. The winners were particularly interested in the Campus mondial de la mer marine research infrastructures and facilities portal and its expertise desk.

The four young researchers also discovered Brest, its coastline, its weather and its cable car, before ending their stay with a day in Paris.