Nordic Algae Symposium: Biotech Viking Style
A troop of six researchers from our group made it over to Norway the other week, to attend the Nordic Algae Symposium 2026 hosted by NORCE in Bergen.
We [they] decided to bombard the conference with our research early on, with four of us giving oral presentations in the morning of day one! By lunch we had left our mark as the ramblers of Sheffield, and we settled down for an afternoon of talks on algae in the circular bioeconomy. Amongst the many interesting projects optimising algae cultivation on aquaculture waste, the hot topic of salmon was briefly interrupted by more sinister discussions of growing algae for military and defence. However, after a coffee break, it was business as usual and the narrative had shifted back to biomass valorisation and fish, including a great Keynote talk on processing brown algae, by my Norwegian counterpart; Øystein Arlov.
After a poster session accompanied by some fresh beverages, everyone was in high spirits for the rest of the evening, and a nice conference dinner was followed by a trip to the local bar near the harbour.
The next morning we were thrown straight back into a lecture theatre for another morning of talks which ranged from work on carbon capture and valorisation, to strain optimisation, with a side of good old biofuels.
The organisers then briefly announced some conference awards, including ‘best student oral presentation’ which I was delighted to receive for my talk titled ‘Engineering synthetic phycospheres for paracetamol mineralisation using microalgae as a biosensor’. There was no time to dwell on this though, as next we were whisked off to the National Algaepilot Mongstad (NAM), where an impressive research facility kitted out with tubular bioreactors awaited us. Here, NORCE and the University of Bergen collaborate to accommodate pilots for scale-up, and at the time of our visit, they were specifically looking at the growth of Chlorella sorokiniana in aquaculture wastewater.
The site visit concluded the conference, and the following day was spent enjoying the other sights Bergen has to offer, the most notable of which was the funicular railway. All in all, we had a great time in Norway as a group, and got to make connections with a whole new network of people from Scandinavia.
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