Speech to Peter Bondo Christensen – recipient of the Aarhus University Jubilee Fund’s Research Dissemination Prize

Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen, rektor, Aarhus Universitet

Dear Peter, I award you the Research Dissemination Prize of 100,000 Danish kroner in recognition of your outstanding dissemination of knowledge from the university to society.

You took your PhD degree at the Department of Biology in 1989. Since then you have been employed at the National Environmental Research Institute, though with the fusion between Aarhus University and the National Environmental Research Institute in 2007, one could say that things have come full circle and you have returned to the university. We are very happy about this. You are a unique example of a researcher who manages to combine an international carrier within cutting-edge research and a vivid and engaged dissemination effort in an outstanding manner. Not just within your own field, but actually within the natural sciences in a broad sense.

The popular dissemination of the results of research has been close to your heart throughout your carrier. You understand better than most how to disseminate scientific material that is difficult to understand in an easily understandable manner using vivid and lively language. However, one of the highlights of your scientific career was the ground-breaking work on electrical currents in marine sediment, which was published in the recognised journal Nature in February of this year. Here you documented together with your colleagues how bacteria couple electrical currents with one another over distances that can be more than 20,000 times their own length. In connection with this discovery you have placed a great deal of emphasis on dissemination – as is the case with all of your work throughout your carrier.

Your commitment to the art of dissemination is also clearly seen by the fact that you have taken an education as journalist at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus.

You are the author of a number of popular books in which natural science subjects play an important role. Among others, the book on the Sirius sledge patrol. You are an avid contributor to the Great Danish Encyclopaedia (Den Store Danske Encyklopædi). Your work is disseminated through TV, newspapers and journals; with your contribution from Galathea 3, where you disseminated knowledge directly from the ship into classrooms, we can certainly call you an ambassador for the natural sciences.

It therefore gives me great pleasure to present Aarhus University Jubilee Fund’s Research Dissemination Prize (Aarhus Universitets Jubilæumsfonds Forskningsformidlingspris) to senior researcher Peter Bondo Christensen.

Congratulations!