Present: Allen Pope, Angelika Renner, Jennifer Provencher, Jenny Baeseman (Director), Luís Guilherme Resende de Assis, and Yulia Zaika (President)

The APECS Executive Committee 2011/2012 met for the first time in person two weeks ago in the city of Tromsø. The ExCom heads up APECS through leading action, strategy, and decision-making within APECS. Accordingly, the meeting days focused on planning for the upcoming APECS Director transition period as well as the future growth of APECS. This included many discussions about institutional knowledge transfer, hiring schedules, job descriptions, costs to be incurred, strategic plans, and many other administrative considerations. It might not all sound like an exciting job, but it was good experience for the ExCom members and hopefully will ensure smooth sailing for the rest of APECS in the coming years. And the Northern lights a few nights didn’t hurt either!

While in Tromsø, the ExCom also took the opportunity to meet with local partners and advisors including the Arctic Council Secretariat, University of Tromsø administrators, Norwegian Polar Institute, ARCTOS, IASC, the High North Academy, and the APECS Norge Board of Directors. Look out for more collaborations with these folks in the future!

Moving into 2012, the ExCom is really excited that we all got the chance to meet in person! The main takeaway from the meeting is that we want to do all we can to make sure that APECS continues to move both move forwards and innovate. APECS has earned itself a worldwide reputation as THE organization for young polar researchers, and the ExCom will make sure we do all we can to sustain APECS.

In the coming weeks and months we will be posting the resulting job description, policies, and strategy documents and you will see the ideas we came up with turn into action. As always, if you have questions, comments, or want to get involved, just Contact Us!