how it all started

The course is young but has some history already :) We'd like to keep track of its development. Below is the story of the course's establishment, and you will find some highlights of 2015 and 2016 sessions in relevant sections. Enjoy!

This educational endeavour has developed from research collaboration between biologists from Tromsø, Norway and St Petersburg, Russia.

The roots go further back in time, but it was in 2013 when a joint grant proposal from University of Tromsø (UiT), St Petersburg State University (SPbU), University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ZIN RAS) was supported by Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education - SIU.

The main ambition of the project “Bilateral Arctic Marine Science and student Exchange programme (BAMSE)” was to improve the quality of the education currently provided within the field of Arctic Marine Sciences in Norway and in Russia. The project was led by professors Jørgen Berge and Andrei Granovitch and was fulfilled in 2014-2016. After completing the project the decision was made to continue running the course “Evolutionary and Taxonomic Diversity of Marine invertebrates” at the White Sea every second year, from 2018 onward.

We will write more about how we succeeded (mostly!) and suffered (a bit J) during “BAMSE” in 2014-2016, come back to check this page later!