It is our great pleasure to announce the APECS Council and Council subcommittee chairs for the 2014-15 term! Bios of all council members, including those who are serving as chairs of the various committees, can be viewed herehere.
This term the Council chairs will be Michael (Mika) Laiho and Hanne Nielsen and Hanne Nielsen. This is Michael’s second term as the council chair. He is half British, half Finnish, and is passionate about equality, and global environmental and social justice. Michael is based at Durham University, UK, and has a particular interest in political science and deconstructing the discourse on ‘Arctic space.’ Hanne is a PhD student at the University of Tasmania, working on cultural representations of Antarctica. She examines the narratives that have been told about Antarctica via both theatre and advertising. Hanne and Michael look forward to bringing researchers involved in both Polar Regions together to forge productive collaborations over the coming year.
The APECS Council also has three subcommittees: the Research Activities committee (RAC), the Membership Involvement committee (MIC) and the Education and Outreach committee (EOC). This term the RAC will be led by Rachel Downey and Alice Bradley. and Alice Bradley. Alice is based at the University of Colorado and is currently working in the Aerospace Engineering department, focusing on Remote Sensing, Earth and Space Sciences. Her research centers on in sea ice - ocean - atmosphere interactions in environments with partial sea ice cover using unmanned aircraft as a sensing platform. Rachel is based at Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Germany. She is a PhD student researching the ecological impacts of environmental change on sponge communities, specifically the biological impacts of the Larsen AB ice-shelf collapse in Antarctica, and has broad skills in Southern Ocean marine taxonomy. Alice and Rachel look forward to advancing the Research Activities committee over the coming year.
For the 2014/15 terms the MIC will be led by Silvia Lourenço and Elena Kuznetsovaand Elena Kuznetsova. Silvia is a Marine Biologist with a MSc in ecology, management and modeling of marine resources from the University Nova de Lisboa. She is in the final steps of defending her PhD thesis and currently holds a grant at the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere to study the effect of environmental factors in the life cycle of cephalopods. Elena is a postdoctoral researcher at the Road and Transport group of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Her main topic is frost heaving with special application to roads in cold climate regions. Elena is also an IASC (International Arctic Science Committee) fellow in the Cryosphere Working Group (CWG) and a member of PYRN ExCom. Elena and Silvia take the lead on several exciting membership involvement projects, so if you would like to be involved, please get in touch.
Finally, the EOC will be chaired by Laura Kelvin and Francyne Elias-Piera and Francyne Elias-Piera. Laura is a PhD candidate at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research sees her take an archaeological ethnographic approach to explore how perceptions of the past and archaeological research vary within the Inuvialuit community of Sachs Harbour, NWT. As a result, she hopes to determine how archaeology can best complement Inuvialuit understandings of the past. Francyne has worked with the Brazilian Antarctic Program (PROANTAR) with Antarctic Macro fauna since 2000. She has taught science in both Elementary and Secondary Schools, and is currently in the final year of her PhD program at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), where she works with trophic relationships using different biomarkers (Stable isotope, biochemical balance and fatty acids) and investigates how climate change affects these interactions. Laura and Francyne will take charge of Education and Outreach, bring in the polar region into the lives of many all over the world with the help of APECS members on several continents.
If you would like to know more about our new chairs, please check out their bios on the Council webpage. We have a diverse range of people represented this coming year: geographically, in terms of career stage, and in terms of experience with APECS. We look forward to the new energy and initiatives our 2014/15 council members and chairs have to offer!
