Ola M. Johannessen is the Founding Director of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing
Center (NERSC) and the Mohn-Sverdrup Center for Global Ocean Studies and Operational Oceanography (MSC) in Bergen, Norway. He has also a tenured chair in oceanography/remote sensing at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. He is the President of the Nansen
Interrnational Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NIERSC) in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Chairrman of the Board of the Nansen Center in Cochin, India and co-chairman of the Board of the Nansen-Zhu Center at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of
Science in Beijing.
Prof. Johannessen is involved in the following fields : high latitude global warming studies including Greenland Ice Sheet ; global change studies of marine radioactive spreading, ecosystems, pollution and harmful algae blooms ; and acoustic monitoring on climate and
development of operational oceanography.
He is the author and co-author of 470 publications of which 125 are in referee journals, books and proceedings.
He has received 3 prizes for his scientific papers, and was awarded the Norwegian Nansen Prize for 2002.
Ola Johannessen has been elected to many leading academic bodies.
He is elected full member of the International Academy of Astronautics, the European Academy of
Science and Arts, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Academy of Technical Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.