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Brit Lisa Skjelkvåle Monsen
- People flourish when they are allowed to evolve professionally, says Brit Lisa Skjelkvåle Monsen. A focus on the individual and its potential for development is important in making NIVA a modern place of work, she continues.
- I like to work at NIVA because I enjoy to feel that I accomplish something, says Brit Lisa. She has been at NIVA since she received her PhD scholarship in 1988.
- I wanted to work with acid rain and got the opportunity with a fellowship position at NIVA. Interesting tasks, good projects and exciting results kept coming my way, so I stayed.
She describes NIVA as a dynamic place of work with a lot of competent people and an active academic environment. She is now Research Director for the Centre of Inland Water Research as well as working on a number of research projects. Acid rain is still an important area of work for her, but the field of research has widened to include other long-range transboundary pollutants.
She highlights international activities as another inspiring part of working at NIVA. The institute conducts research projects all over the world, and is regularly involved in international projects with participants from a range of countries.
- We have a large network, and collaborate with research scientists in Europe, North-America and other parts of the world. We are in close contact with other research environments and exchange our thoughts and experience with colleagues elsewhere.
Richard Wright
Richard (Dick) Wright is a long-standing employee at NIVA. He prefers to work with the most pressing environmental threats, and for the past 10-15 years his research focus has been on the effects of climate change.
When he started at NIVA the main theme of his research was acid rain. - We performed monitoring and data collection, field experiments, and studied the results up against ecosystem models. Our most spectacular project must have been when we built a roof over a precipitation field to see the results of protecting an entire area from acid rain.
Dick is now a senior researcher and is much less involved in fieldwork. He manages large projects and facilitates field expeditions, but is rarely out collecting data.
- These days, I spend most of my time in front of a PC or in meetings. Other researchers do the fieldwork and provide me with lab results, and then I analyse the findings.
He says that he enjoys fieldwork, but that it is not his role anymore. But the job as senior researcher is varied, and Dick appreciates the freedom he has in choosing his areas of research. At the moment he is involved in several large research projects, among others an EU project that explores the impact of climate change on freshwaters.
NIVA has changed quite a bit since Dick became a permanent employee in 1978.
- First and foremost, the institute has become more international both in regards to its employees and the projects we work with, he says. In the past 5 years we have gone through a generation shift among our employees. There are many more young NIVAists now than only a few years ago.
