Hello!
My name is Hanif Kawousi. I’ve lived in Bergen for the past seven years, the last five with my wife and dog. Some of you may recognise me from classes or the hallways, as I recently graduated from BIO. I am excited to extend my journey at BIO as a PhD student with the Between The Fjords group over the next four years.
I will be working with the ECOBUDGETS project, collaborating with Vigdis Vandvik, Joachim Paul Töpper (NINA), Liv Guri Velle (NIBIO), and Håvard Haarstad (CET). The project aims to support municipalities and regional authorities in making sustainable choices by integrating budgets for emissions reduction and land use changes into their financial, administrative, and political decision-making processes.
For my master’s thesis, I worked with Jarl Giske and Sergey Budaev from the Theoretical Ecology Group to create a model focused on the Ecology of Fear (Brown, 1999). Here, I examined how (digital) songbirds with an adapted fear response would react to a sudden surge in fear induced by their environment.
While I greatly enjoyed my thesis work (and continue to refine the model), I am very excited to work on the new project with the gang at Between The Fjords and be your colleague for the next four years.
Welcome, Hanif!