Johan Stapel director of the St Eustatius knowledge centre

13-05-2013   Dr J. Stapel has been appointed director at the new knowledge centre CNSI on St Eustatius. Mr Stapel currently works at IMARES Wageningen UR, where in the past few years he has been involved in establishing a tropics team and where he is the coordinator of the Wageningen interdisciplinary research programme Triple P @ Sea Caribbean Netherlands. He is also the coordinator of the Dutch platform for Tropical Marine Biology AcroporaNet.

The multidisciplinary knowledge centre Caribbean Netherlands Science Institute (CNSI) will be the starting point for research and monitoring in the region and it will play an educational role for the local community. NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, has asked the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) to set up this centre, which will be opened in the autumn of 2013.

In 2012, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) has allocated 2.5 million euros for the establishment of this centre. In addition, a sum of 10 million euros has been allocated by the Ministry of OCW for launching a research programme, aimed at the Caribbean. Dutch researchers can submit research proposals for this Caribbean research programme to NWO later this year. The research programme and the knowledge centre focus on earth and life sciences, complemented by topics from the humanities and social sciences.

Johan Stapel
Johan Stapel (1967) studied Biology at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He started his scientific career researching seagrasses in Indonesia; after his PhD, he worked as a scientist for several employers including the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO) in Yerseke, the National Institute for Coastal and Marine Management (RIKZ) in Middelburg and the Radboud University.

From 2000, he was responsible for bilateral scientific collaboration with Indonesia on behalf of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Mr Stapel's policy focused on multidisciplinary scientific collaboration, capacity building and mutual interest, encouraging collaboration with other scientific organizations, such as NWO.

From 2010, he began to focus more on the Caribbean and he launched a Dutch scientific network for tropical marine biology, AcroporaNet. As a scientist at IMARES Wageningen UR, he has been working on establishing a tropics team and he has been the coordinator of the multidisciplinary research programme Triple P @ Sea Caribbean Netherlands for the past few years.

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More information about Johan Stapel or at LinkedIn.
More information about CNSI.
More information about AcroporaNet.