IMBRSea's alumni earns Best Thesis award

Every year VLIZ (Flanders Marine Institute) awards two prizes for master theses written at a Flemish university, or written by a Flemish researcher at a non-Flemish institution. Both fundamental and applied research in all branches of marine sciences are taken into consideration.

This year, the first place in the VLIZ Master Thesis Award (biological study) was awarded to Loïc Van Audenhaege. As a student of Ghent University he followed the International Master of Science in Marine Biological Resources (IMBRSea) and did this research as part of his master thesis at the National Oceanography Center in the United Kingdom.

Loïc Van Audenhaege took on the many technological and methodological challenges to carry out a habitat study on a submarine vertical wall at a depth of 750 meters in Greenland waters. With a multibeam echo sounder mounted on an underwater robot he unlocked the detailed complexity of the vertical wall and identified potential habitats. Using samples and high-resolution images taken by the robot, the typical organisms for each of the habitats in this vertical deep-sea environment were identified to species level.

Congratulations Loïc!! Keep on the good work!