The Uruguayan-German Limnologist Miriam Libertad Gerhard recently has been awarded the second prize in the category Doctoral Dissertations of the Science Award 2020 of the Oldenburg Landesbank (OLB) Foundation. Since 2000, the OLB Foundation presents its science award for outstanding work at colleges of higher education and universities in northwestern Germany.

At present, Gerhard does her research as a postdoctoral fellow at the ICBM Wilhelmshaven site in the Planktology research group, headed by Professor Helmut Hillebrand. She received the award endowed with 3,500 euros for her doctoral thesis on “Phytoplankton community responses to nutrient availability: interactions with temperature and diversity“. During her work on her dissertation, Gerhard was mainly supervised by private lecturer Dr Maren Striebel, who was awarded a prize for excellent research in 2018.

In 2020, the OLB Foundation Science Award was announced for the eleventh time already. This time, the foundation awarded two first and two second places due to extraordinary performance in the category Dissertations.

Gerhard received the unofficial news that she had won the award in February 2021. An awards ceremony for the seven prize winners was planned for the end of March. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event had to be cancelled. It has been revealed only recently that the awardees eventually received their award certificate via letter post.