Niels de Winter is the laureate of the FWO Climate price 2024 for his work on bivalve shell as archive of high resolution ancien climate changes. Niels works on shell building process in organisms such as mussels and oysters that slowly form CaCO3 layers over periods from hundreds of years to days. He studies modern organisms to better infer how fossils shells represent detailed archives of previous climate and environmental changes in seawater temperature and salinity. His unique approach, relying on stable and clumped isotopes as well as trace element concentrations, makes it possible to precisely reconstruct seasonal climate patterns millions of years ago. Information about these very short term environmental fluctuations contribute to better understand the ongoing climate changes, at a scale that is human-relevant. Niels obtained his PhD at AMGC-VUB with Philippe Claeys in 2019, and is now also an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
The other two FWO climate price laureates of this year are also connected to VUB: Wim Thiery is a professor in the group Water and Climate and Sebastiaan van de Velde now at University Antwerp obtained his PhD at AMGC a few years ago.
Read all about it in VUB Newsletter.