FRONTIERS Residency Fellowship for Tim Kalvelage: GFZ

03/17/2025 Awards & Honours Ice Melt Climate Microbes Worldwide Department 3: Geochemie Topic 1: Atmosphere in Global Change Topic 2: Oceans and Cryosphere 3-5 Grenzflächen-Geochemie PM_2025 Kacheln unterm Slider

The science journalist and photographer Tim Kalvelage is a guest in the section of Liane G. Benning.

Tim Kalvelage, wearing a red functional jacket, sits in front of a snow-covered white background, with snow-capped mountains on the horizon and just a few rocks jutting out into the sky. — Portrait of Tim Kalvelage. *(Photo: private)*

The journalist and photographer Tim Kalvelage has recently become a guest at the GFZ Section 3.5 Interface Geochemistry, headed by Liane G. Benning. The stay of several months is made possible by the “FRONTIERS Science Journalism Residency Program”. FRONTIERS is a science journalism initiative funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The fellowship program enables journalists to spend several months at European research institutions to delve into a research field and engage in intensive exchange with researchers. Tim Kalvelage will spend his five-month FRONTIERS fellowship at the GFZ in Potsdam and at the iC3 Centre for ice, Cryosphere, Carbon and Climate in Tromsø, Norway.

Tim Kalvelage has a doctorate in biogeochemistry and has been working as a freelance science journalist for six years. He completed his doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and then worked as a postdoc in Halifax, Canada, and at ETH Zurich. Today he works as a science reporter and photographer for German and English-language newspapers, magazines and online media, for example Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. His main topics are ocean and climate research, especially in the polar regions.

The guiding question of his FRONTIERS fellowship is: How do glacier microbes and meltwater inputs influence the Earth system from the atmosphere to the ocean? During his stay at GFZ, Tim Kalvelage will join Liane G. Benning's team on field research in Iceland in April 2025.

Liane G. Benning says: “I am very happy to welcome Tim as a guest journalist in my team at GFZ. His media training and the planned results, which will come out of such real collaborations between researchers and science journalists, are more important than ever in today's world of disinformation.”

In addition, two workshops at the GFZ are aimed at researchers who would like to learn more about working with media professionals and science communication (on March 27 and April 3).

By supporting independent science journalism through the FRONTIERS program, the European Research Council (ERC) aims to help strengthen public trust in science, combat misinformation, and improve society's resilience to disinformation.