“Kees Bakker" award for Bregje Brinkmann
Leiden Biology student Bregje Brinkmann received the annual award for being the best BSc-student in 2014 from the “Stichting Professor Dr. K. Bakker-fonds”.
Brinkmann received the “Kees Bakker award” from Professor Eddy van der Meijden in the presence of Director of Education Johan Memelink. The award consists of a certificate of qualification and €1500,- which she should invest in her career for an international research internship. The prize is awarded every year to the best BSc-student in Biology in Leiden with the highest grades and ambition to specialize in evolutionary or ecological studies.
Next year, Bregje Brinkmann will study at the research group of Aquatic Environmental Ecology in Amsterdam ( IBED-AEE, UvA ). Her project will be about how limnetic organic aggregates define algal growth under the turbid and oligotrophic conditions of the large but shallow Lake Marken (Rhine Delta, the Netherlands).
Brinkmann: “In deep, stratified lakes, bacterial activity has previously been found to release nutrients from organic aggregates falling down from the surface of the lake. I am curious if similar activity affects algal ecology in large shallow lakes. The “Kees Bakker Award” enables me to visit foreign research groups that have either investigated the release of nutrients from organic aggregates in deep lakes or study large shallow lakes similar to Lake Marken. I am looking forward to meeting scientists working in the field.”
About Kees Bakker
Kees Bakker retired as Professor in Animal Ecology in 1991 after 41 years at the Institute of Evolutionary and Ecological Sciences (which merged in 2009 with the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences into the Institute of Biology Leiden) and passed away in 2010. He was investigator of ecological competition among insect species, a vivid proponent of the evolutionary approach and wrote a well-known text book on ecology in Dutch. This discipline of study is continued at the IBL today by several investigators of plant and insect ecology; see for example the personal pages of the following investigators and teachers Klaas Vrieling, Tom de Jong, Maurijn van der Zee and Daniel Rozen.