SILA

Scientific and Indigeous teachings on Life in the Artic

New exciting developments are emerging in the Greenland research and education sectors. Aage V. Jensen’s Foundations has supported these developments for years through financing among other infrastructure such as Pikialaarfik, the educational facility placed between Ilisimatusarfik (The University of Greenland) and Pinngortitaleriffik (The Greenland Institute of Natural Resources) and most recently with the new state-of-the-art research vessel Tarajoq.

AVJF has now catalyzed new progress, that will enable Greenlandic youth and future generations in Greenland to become an even bigger part of the Greenlandic research and education community.

AVJF is supporting the projects SILA – a Greenlandic biology bachelor program and ASI Inuit Microbiology Lab with personnel and research funding. The SILA project is supported with essential personnel, who will be responsible for securing the financing to establish a biology bachelor program at the University of Greenland in close collaboration with The Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. SILA is envisioned to be a biology program built specifically for the Greenlandic context, where the privileged access to nature in Greenland will be used as a foundation for the content and pedagogy of the program. Students in SILA will be learning about climate change while standing in the changing climate. They will be trained in natural resource management in a society, where this is of highest political priority. And, students will be able to learn based on the many varied human-nature relations that exist in Greenland including hunting, fishing, ecotourism, biotechnology and more.

The ASI Lab is a microbiological research lab overlapping with the team behind SILA. The ASI Lab focuses on human-nature relations in Greenland using microbiological methodology and Inuit perspectives. The main project of the ASI Lab will be GASTROPHAGY, researching the intestinal microbiome of Arctic food webs from plankton to human. The ASI Inuit Microbiology Lab will ensure a strong scientific core to support the SILA biology bachelor program.