Niklas Boers Honored with Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award
European Geosciences Union Award Goes to Scientist at Freie Universität Berlin
№ 070/2021 from Apr 28, 2021
Freie Universität Berlin physicist Dr. Niklas Boers was recently announced as a recipient of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award 2021. The prestigious award demonstrates the EGU’s recognition for the scientist’s important contributions to our understanding of nonlinear processes in the Earth system, especially in regard to tipping points, extreme events, and predictability. In a statement, the EGU described Dr. Boers as a remarkable applied mathematician and theoretical physicist who has made exceptional contributions to nonlinear and complex system science applied to geoscientific problems.
The EGU also recognized Dr. Boers’ innovative creation of a method for analyzing and predicting extreme weather events. This method, which was developed by Boers in the course of his doctoral research at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is now used widely in many different areas. Following his doctorate, Boers held a highly prestigious Humboldt Foundation Fellowship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he made significant contributions to the analysis of paleoclimate data and developed ways of modeling fundamental underlying processes and mechanisms. The EGU also noted Boers’ outstanding achievements as an author of scientific articles. Boers has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed research papers and is lead author on about half of them. The EGU described Boers’ works as “mathematically creative and sound,” while the applications are “diverse and of major geoscientific interest.”
At Freie Universität Berlin, Boers leads a research group funded by the Volkswagen Foundation through a Freigeist Fellowship, focusing on mathematical and machine-learning methods to model climate dynamics. The group has a special interest in predicting extreme events and abrupt transitions in the Earth system. Boers also researches at PIK and is a part-time senior lecturer in the mathematics department of the University of Exeter, UK. Niklas Boers is a coordinator for the project “Tipping Points in the Earth System” (TiPES) funded by a European Union Horizon 2020 grant. He also leads the Horizon 2020 Innovative Training Network “CriticalEarth” at Freie Universität. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Postdoc Award of the State of Brandenburg.
Contact
Dr. Niklas Boers, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Email: boers@pik-potsdam.de