Bodil Bluhm

I am Research Associate Professor for Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks. Born and raised near Hamburg, Germany I was early on fascinated by the freezing up Baltic and Wadden Seas, and the variety of shells found on the beaches of European coasts. Knowing I would not excel as a lawyer or economist, I took every possible field class offered at Kiel University and enjoyed internships in Canada, Scotland and Germany. I finally decided to conduct Arctic marine studies in the Barents Sea for my MSc work at the Institute of Polar Ecology at Kiel University. This work got me hooked on the high latitudes and I was thrilled that my PhD work would take me to Antarctica's rich and fascinating seas with the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. My initial research focus on the population dynamics of polar benthic invertebrates has broadened since my husband and I moved to Alaska in 2001. This is when I also began exploring Arctic sea ice communities, food webs, biodiversity, community ecology and cryo-pelagic-benthic coupling processes. In the last ten years, my research has taken me to Alaskan, Canadian and Russian Arctic waters from the coast to the deep sea. Some of my recent work has contributed to the Russian-American-Longterm-Census-of-the-Arctic, the Census of Marine Life, and the Bering Sea Ecosystem Study.