Aaron Kiss
Expertise: Biology
Affiliation: Budapest University, Hungary
Who I am and what I Do
I'm a 20 year old student, I live in Hungary in a small town near Budapest. Now I'm doing my fifth semester at Eotvos Lorand University, Department of Natural Science as a biologist. I have been investigating the Ciliata fauna of the river Danube for the half the year, and I work week by week at the Hungarian Danube Research Station (it is an Institute of Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Expedition role
As a hydrobiologist my work is to climb up with the team to the Crater Lake to take water samples from it. I'll have to filter several hundred-litre water to get enough planktonic organisms for detailed investigations, and fix them in different ways.
Describe how you will use information from last year's expedition to perform experiments for this year's mission.
During my investigations on samples taken from Crater Lake last year I found few Ciliates beside the algae. That means there is a simple food web in the lake based on algae. Ciliates are the grazers of them. This year it would be important to obtain an exact list of species and make quantitative analyses for the food web.
What made you study science?
I suppose I've been interested in natural sciences since I went to nursery school, my friends told me there that I would make a good scientist. Perhaps I inherited my interest from my father. I was always fascinated from the diversity of nature and I wanted to know how things work in it. Being a scientist, it has never been a question for me.
Family, hobbies, interests, etc.
I like astronomy. I have an own refracting telescope and I make observations especially from planets (Mercury, Mars). I can hardly wait to see the sky in the southern hemisphere it's of course completely unknown for me. In my free time I often go to mountain areas to climb rock or do high mountain trekking. I've climbed a lot in High Tatra-Mountains or in the Eastern Alps, last summer I climbed the Mont Blanc (4810 m). I'm waiting forward to the expedition this year, Licancabur will be the highest mountain I've ever climbed. |
