Lise Øvreås

Lise Øvreås serves as a Vice-President (Environment Programme; External Stakeholders and Partner Engagement) of EASAC from 2024 – 2026. She is a professor in Geomicrobiology at University of Bergen, Norway and was President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Norway (DNVA) in 2022 – 2024. She holds a PhD degree in microbiology from the University of Bergen from 1998 and became a full professor in 2007. She was part of the Norwegian Research Funded Center of Excellence (COE) in Geobiology at University of Bergen from 2007 – 2012 where she led the working group “The Deep Biosphere”. Through the CoE she took part in several fieldworks and research cruises in the Arctic Ocean as well as in the Pacific Ocean. Her research interest is microbial diversity and ecology along environmental gradients. She is especially interested in studying the impact of climate change on microbial communities, including the impact of warming of permafrost soils and glacier ecosystems. She has been involved in Arctic fieldwork and research projects for more than 25 years.

Øvreås served as the Dean of Research at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at University of Bergen from 2010 – 2014. Since 2016 she has also been Adjunct Professor at University Center in Svalbard (UNIS) responsible for Arctic Microbiology course. From 2019 – 2021 she was the Academic director for Ocean Sustainability Bergen (OSB) a multidisciplinary research center to provide research for a sustainable Ocean. The overall goal was to strengthen the science-policy interface and to ensure that political decisions are better informed by science. OSB administered the university’s status as SDG14 Hub for United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) and leading the SDG14 cluster for the International Association of Universities (IAU), heading a consortium of ten world-leading marine universities to engage with the 2030 agenda.

Her honours include Fulbright Arctic Chair professorship at Laurence Berkeley National Laboratories, California from 2012 – 2013, fellowships in Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA) from 2013, Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (NTVA) from 2014 and Academiae Europeae from 2022.