MOSAiC School 2019

Two teachers from Germany and two educators from the United States had the unique opportunity to join the MOSAiC School 2019. You can find out more about who they are below.

• Falk Ebert - Germany

  I started out in applied mathematics with a specialty in coupled systems of differential equations. I got my Masters degree in 2004 and my PhD at TU Berlin in 2008. Then I shifted my focus to schools and outreach activities of the Matheon research center before becoming a maths and physics teacher in 2011 at Herder High School in Berlin. Here, I use my academic background to get pupils excited about maths and science.

  I am co-organizer of the "Jugend forscht" science fair and senior jury member of the German Young Physicists' Tournament.
  Since 2017 I also work part-time at Humboldt-University of Berlin instructing new maths teachers.

  I like travelling, science, maths puzzles, archery and cooking.

• Katie Aspen Gavenus - United States

  Katie Aspen Gavenus grew up in the not-quite-Arctic town of Homer, Alaska. She is an environmental educator and program director for the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies. Her undergraduate degree is in Environmental Studies and Visual Art through Bowdoin College in Maine, US. She recently completed a Master's Degree in Science Education through IslandWood and the University of Washington (Seattle, Washington, US). Katie is committed to making science education - and educationmore broadly - locally relevant, culturally sustaining, inspiring, and empowering. She believesscience education should be a collaborative effort between learners, educators, researchers, knowledge-bearers, and community members.

  She enjoys learning, kayaking, picking berries, hiking, catching salmon, playing soccer, growing food and tide pooling. She makes good soup and is perfecting a yeasty-biscuity bread recipe. Her favorite type of plankton is ctenophores/comb jellies and she has a tiny scar from being bitten by an intertidal worm.

• Anne Gold - United States

  Dr. Anne Gold is the Director of CIRES Education & Outreach and a Senior Associate Scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she focuses on science education for educators, students and the general public around climate, water, polar regions and general geoscience education. She is interested in understanding and studying effective ways of teaching and learning and is dedicated to grounding her education work in solid research and evaluation. Anne has worked for over a decade with researchers to support them in broadening the impact of their science. Anne is a climate scientist by training with a doctoral degree in Paleoclimatology from the University of Regensburg in Germany.

• Friederike Krüger - Germany

  I am a teacher for German and Geography with a past as a journalist for Süddeutsche Zeitung, now living in Hannover. During my studies at LMU (Munich) I spend a few months in Iceland which inspired me to write my final thesis about the melting of glaciers worldwide.

  Being part of MOSAiC unites my passion for teaching, my special interest in glaciology and the effects of global warming as well as my journalistic curiosity. I am looking forward to experiencing the scientific methods and their results first hand, transporting them into the school and giving my students an authentic insight into the Arctic and its ecosystem as well as the work of scientists. Therefore, I will design very different materials for German schools but also organize workshops and talks afterwards, because it is my further goal to convince students and adults of the effects of global warming whilst presenting them hard facts and good arguments. During MOSAiC SCHOOL I‘m going to show you the most important criteria for useful data, media and information for teachers, the conveyance of science into schools and modern methods of teaching and learning.

The following lecturers were teaching during the MOSAiC School 2019.

• Anja Sommerfeld - Germany

  Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

  Sommerfeld, Anja is the project manager of the MOSAiC project. MOSAiC is the largest Arctic expedition of our time with a highly international consortium and is coordinated at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam (AWI). For one year (from September 2019 until September 2020) the German research icebreaker POLARSTERN will be frozen into the Arctic sea ice and drift with the natural sea ice drift across the central Arctic. Anja, as part of the coordination team, manages the day to day business of MOSAiC and functions as an interface between the coordination, the scientists of all different nations and AWI`s logistics department in Bremerhaven. In addition, she supports the media and outreach activity to enlarge the awareness about Arctic science and its importance. As scientist Anja will participate in one of the cruise legs of the year-around expedition. Before starting the position as project manager, Anja was a PhD student in the section Physics of the Atmosphere at AWI Potsdam that results in a PhD degree in 2015. From 2006 until 2012 she studied Meteorology at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

• Josefine Lenz - Germany

  Alfred Wegener Institute & Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, Germany

  Josefine Lenz is a geographer by training with a strong interest in changing Arctic landscapes and thaw lake dynamics. In 2016, she has received her PhD and continued working in the Permafrost Research Section at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Gemany, in close collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA. Her engagement in international committees and young researchers’ networks has continuously increased, e.g. as IASC Fellow in 2015/2016, Vice-President of APECS in 2016/2017 and founding member and chair of APECS Germany in 2018/2019. 

  Besides Arctic research, science communication and support of the next generation of Polar researchers as always been key for her. As a project officer for APECS in the in the EU Horizon 2020-funded project ARICE, Josefine will continue her efforts e.g. by coordinating the MOSAiC School. 

  Josefine has undertaken 6 land expeditions into the Arctic and one 7-week cruise into the Indian Ocean with RV Sonne – now she is more than excited to expand her experience during the first leg of MOSAiC and learn from and with the 20 enthusiastic MOSAiC School participants.

• Ian Brooks - United Kingdom

  University of Leeds, United Kingdom

  Ian Brooks studied physics at the University of Manchester Institute for Science and Technology, staying on for a PhD in thunderstorm electrification processes. He moved to Scripps Institution of Oceanography for post-doctoral research in marine meteorology, studying marine stratocumulus, and boundary layer turbulent structure. He returned to the UK and the University of Leeds in 2002, where he is now professor of boundary layer processes in the School of Earth and Environment. His research is based around field measurements of atmospheric boundary layer processes, including atmosphere-ocean interactions, and Arctic boundary layer and cloud processes.

  He has undertaken four research cruises in the central Arctic ocean, including two drifting stations with substantial installations of instrumentation on the sea ice. He has also led two aircraft based measurement campaigns over the marginal sea ice around Svalbard.

• Stanislav Ksenofontov - Russia

  Ammosov North Eastern Federal University, Russia

  My name is Stanislav (Stas) Ksenofontov. I'm native Sakha and Evenk from the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), North-Eastern Siberia, Russia. My very first degree is in Chinese and English linguistics obtained from the Far Eastern State University for Humanities in the Russian city of Khabarovsk, not far from China. But my passion turned out to be in human geography PhD in which I gained in 2018 at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In my research I have been dealing with the global change impacts on the biodiversity and indigenous people's livelihoods in Arctic Yakutia. Particularly, I have been focusing on climate change, land use change, overexploitation and socio-political transformations affecting indigenous communities in the north of Yakutia. After my PhD I had a research fellowship in South Korea investigating Korean scientific, political and economic interests in the Arctic. Currently I work as a senior researcher at the Ammosov North Eastern Federal University in my home town of Yakutsk. I am an International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) fellow 2018 for the social and human working group and Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) Council Co-Chair. Other than research, I really like traveling, dancing traditional Evenki heeje or traditional Sakha ohuokhai, playing khomus (Jew's harp), nature. I hope that I will bring up important issues all indigenous communities around the Arctic face now. And I do believe that students of MOSAiC school will take some messages home and raise awareness among their families, friends and colleagues.

• Thomas Rackow - Germany

  Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany

  Thomas Rackow has been a postdoc and climate modeller at the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany since 2015. His research is based around mechanisms of climate variability and systematic errors of climate models. He enjoys teaching, working with mathematical and physical models, and co-developed the first coupled climate model with a sea ice-ocean component supporting triangular multi-resolution grids during his PhD. The model is now known as the AWI Climate Model (AWI-CM) and it is used for a variety of different projects, including the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) that provides the basis for the next IPCC report. Thomas’ research goal is to add previously missing features and processes like mesoscale ocean eddies, leads in sea ice, or the drift of icebergs into current climate simulations in order to improve the model predictions. Since the calving of iceberg A68 in July 2017 and its massive media response, he also gained experience in working with press and media representatives. He received a diploma in industrial mathematics („Technomathematik“) in 2011 with a thesis about the drift and decay of icebergs and collaborates with the Sea Ice Drift Forecast Experiment (SIDFEx), which will provide near-real time drift forecasts for Polarstern’s position over the course of the MOSAiC expedition. He is also very interested in art and science communication and is always looking for new creative ways to visualize climate change and its impacts for the public.

• Gunnar Spreen - Germany

  University of Bremen, Germany

  I am working on satellite remote sensing of Polar Regions with focus on monitoring changes of sea ice (extent, mass, and dynamics) and on understanding underlying climate processes. Satellite measurements are validated using ground-based and airborne field observations. Currently I am the head of the research group "Remote Sensing of Polar Regions" at the University of Bremen, Institute of Environmental Physics, Bremen, Germany. Before, I was a research scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway and a postdoctoral scholar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. My Diploma degree in physics (comparable M.Sc.) and the Ph.D. degree in oceanography I received in 2004 and 2008, respectively, from the University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. Current work addresses the development of new retrievals for sea ice parameters like leads from SAR and radiometer data and the coordination of the remote sensing activities for the international Arctic drift expedition MOSAiC.

• Dorothea Bauch - Germany

  GEOMAR, Germany

  My name is Dorothea Bauch and nowadays I would call myself professionally a tracer oceanographer. I use stable isotopes and geo-biochemical methods to investigate the effects of sea ice and ocean stratification on climate change. More specifically I use tracer studies to identify freshwater sources and sea-ice related brine signal within the water column of the central Arctic Ocean and I investigate variations in freshwater sources and budgets on the Siberian shelf regions.
  
  I started my scientific education at the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg with the general intention to do something for environmental protection. I studied physics, some philosophy and more or less forgot about my initial intention till I started my master thesis at the Institute of Environmental Physic in Heidelberg where I developed a device for sample preparation for radiocarbon dating (14C AMS) and applied it to a wide range of environmental samples (soil, atmospheric CO2, foraminiferal carbonate, bones and ocean water). Later on I worked at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, USA, and received my PhD in 1994. At that critical time in my career I had to find my own field and funding and I started working on the interpretation of planktic foraminiferal isotope data based on plankton tow and sediment data. At the same time I also started a family, became mother of three children and till recently worked part time in science at GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany. I continued my studies on planktic foraminifera and moved on to modern analog evaluation of foraminiferal isotope data using a direct comparison of present data for the interpretation of past tracer signals. With the thinning of the arctic sea-ice and several opportunities for wide spread arctic sampling my current research focuses on comprehensive studies of the Arctic Ocean halocline and its formation on the Siberian shelf regions applying isotope oceanographic methods. For the MOSAIC program I will look at the imprint of the melt and freeze cycle reflected in stable oxygen isotopes (δ18O). Based on these investigations I will work with AWI and international colleagues on a better understanding of arctic gas and matter fluxes at the sea-ice ocean interface.

• Matt Shupe - USA

  CIRES, University of Colorado, NOAA, USA

  Matthew Shupe is one of the primary designers of the MOSAiC scientific vision, developing the concept from 22 years of Arctic field work in many locations. His research focuses primarily on atmospheric processes that impact the surface energy budget, specifically including clouds and precipitation, aerosol-cloud interactions, radiation, and atmospheric structure. Starting directly after his undergraduate education, he launched his Arctic research career in the late 1990's at the yearlong, drifting SHEBA project studying the radiative impacts of clouds. Since that time he has engaged in research at Arctic land stations, on cruises through the Arctic Ocean, and on top of the Greenland Ice Sheet, helping to develop a generalized understanding of Arctic cloud processes. Over the course of these field studies, he obtained his PhD from the University of Colorado, and currently works for the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado and NOAA in Boulder.

• Jessie Creamean - USA

  Colorado State University, USA

  Dr. Jessie Creamean is a research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado. She received her B.Sc with high distinction in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and her M.Sc (in 2009) and Ph.D. (in 2012) in chemistry with a specific focus on atmospheric chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. Her thesis focused on aerosol-cloud interactions on the west coast of the United States. She has several publications describing her Ph.D. work, one of them in the journal of Science describing how African dust and biological aerosols enhanced snowfall in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. She then received a fellowship from the National Research Council for her 2-year postdoctoral work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. She became a research scientist at NOAA through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) for about 5 years before transitioning to CSU. She has about 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications on aerosols and their impacts on clouds and precipitation, with 13 of those as lead author. Her research in the last 7 years has involved aerosol-cloud interactions in the Arctic, with specific focus on ice nucleation of aerosols generated from natural (i.e., biological and mineral) sources such as the ocean and vegetation. She has been on over 10 field expeditions: 5 of those as lead principle investigator, 5 being in the Arctic, and 3 specifically on Arctic icebreakers. In addition to being an enthusiastic Arctic atmospheric scientist, she enjoys travelling, yoga, hiking, backcountry skiing, rock climbing, fly fishing, camping, and spending time with her two adorable Golden Retrievers, Montana and Whiskey.

• Timothy Stanton - USA

  Naval Postgraduate School, USA

  I am a Research Professor in physical oceanography specializing in ocean turbulence and mixing. Over the last forty years this has involved me in a range of ocean observation programs spanning nearshore wave breaking and sediment transport, inner shelf non-linear internal waves, iron enrichment experiments in the central Pacific, and ocean / ice interaction studies in the Arctic and Antarctic. Since my participation in the 1997 year-long SHEBA ice drift station in the Beaufort Sea, I have been developing Autonomous Ocean Flux Buoys (https://www.oc.nps.edu/~stanton/fluxbuoy/) that enable year-long measurements of ocean heat, salt and momentum fluxes (vertical transport) just below the ice. The primary objective for the AOFBs and complimentary autonomous ice-deployed instruments is to identify the dominant processes controlling Arctic ice extent and thickness in the rapidly evolving Arctic. These AOFB’s have evolved to include measurements of diffusive fluxes within the salt stratified ocean below the ocean mixed layer, and methods to look at heat trapping in the ocean just below the ice during the sunny Arctic summers. Three of these systems will be deployed from the Fedorov on ice floes about 20 Km from the Polarstern, and one in the main ice camp at the start of the project. I look forward to meeting you during the Fedorov MOSAiC cruise both in the classroom and direct involvement in the instrument deployments. 

• Michel Tsamados - United Kingdom

  University College London, United Kingdom

  I received the M.S. degree in statistical physics from l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France, in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics at Université Claude Bernard, Villeurbanne, France, in 2009, with a focus on the mechanical response of glassy materials from a theoretical and modeling perspective.

  I held several post-doctoral positions with the Centre for Polar Observations and Modeling, University College London, London, U.K. and the University of Reading, U.K., where I implemented several new sea ice model parameterizations including a new anisotropic rheology and a new form drag formulation into the Los Alamos CICE sea ice model. Since 2014, he has been a Lecturer with the Department of Earth Sciences, UCL, where I was involved in the development and analysis of several satellite products in the polar regions ranging from sea ice thickness, sea surface elevation, significant wave heights, snow on sea ice, sea ice roughness, melt pond concentration, and so on.

  At the Alan Turing Institute, London, I lead the working group on data science for climate and the environment. I was also funded by ESA as part of the mission advisory group for the Earth Explorer 9 mission Sea surface Kinematics Multiscale monitoring satellite.

  I received the Prestigious Agrégation de Physique from l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2004 and am delighted to be teaching as part of the MOSAiC school onboard Fedorov. For MOSAiC, I received funding from NERC with Prof Julienne Stroeve from UCL to explore the "Seasonal evolution of Ku- and Ka-band backscattering horizon over snow on first-year and multiyear sea ice" and this will be my first scientific expedition in the polar regions!

• Pauline Snoeijs-Leijonmalm - Sweden

  University of Stockholm, Sweden

  In January 2008 Pauline was appointed professor in Marine Ecology at Stockholm University. Earlier she worked at Uppsala University as professor (2003-2007), senior lecturer (1993-2003), researcher (1989-1993) and PhD-student (1982-1989) in Plant Ecology. Her undergraduate degrees (BSc 1978, MSc 1982) she obtained from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with majors in Aquatic Ecology, Experimental Botany and Geobotany. For more than 25 years she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Marine Ecology at the Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm and has supervised >20 and examinated >70 PhD-students.

• Jari Haapala - Finland

  Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland

  Jari Haapala is a physical oceanographer, graduated at the University of the Helsinki in 2000. For over 25 years, his research has centered on a climate variability and change, development of numerical models and sea ice dynamics research. His expertise extends through a broad range of techniques, from experimental field research and data-analysis to numerical modelling. He is also experienced fieldwork scientist, conducted and coordinated research experiments both in the Arctic Ocean and the Baltic Sea. Currently, he is the head of the Marine Research at the Finnish Meteorological Institute and adjoint professor at the University of Helsinki. He has been involved on several international research projects such as IceState, IRIS, SafeWin, Damocles, SPICES, SmartSea, ARICE and been active in many international bodies, like being present chair of the ArcticROOS and Finnish represent of the IOC, EuroGOOS and EuroArgo. He has authored 59 peer-reviewed publications and 50 other scientific reports. He has 20 years experience on teaching and supervision in the university level. He has been a visiting scientist at the Institute of Marine Research, Kiel, Germany, University Louvain La Neuve, Belgium, Rossby Center, Sweden, Max-Planck Institute of Meteorology, Germany and at the Norwegian Polar Institute.

• Steve Archer - USA

  Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, USA
  

  Dr. Stephen Archer (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6054-2424) is a Senior Research Scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, Maine, USA. His research group examines the biological and environmental processes that influence the exchange of climate-active gases between the ocean and atmosphere. These gases affect atmospheric chemistry and climate and we aim to understand whether their production may change in the future.  Our research covers a variety of disciplines, from studying specific enzymes responsible for key processes in the ocean, to trying to directly measure rates of trace gas flux in or out of seawater or sea-ice. Our research involves extensive fieldwork and has recently ranged from the Canary Islands to the Central Arctic. The group works on both applied and pure research topics and aims to provide some solutions to anthropogenic environmental change. Archer also directs Bigelow Analytical Services, a facility that specializes in the analysis of marine biotoxins for government and academic customers.

• Shannon Hall - USA

  CASW Showcase and Freelance Science Journalist, USA
  

  Shannon Hall is an award-winning freelance science journalist, who specializes in writing about astronomy, geology and the environment. Her work often appears in The New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic, Quanta, Nature, Discover and others. She is also a contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. A constant nomad, she has finally settled down in Colorado where you can find her hiking every weekend with her dog “Moose,” who loves nothing more than diving head-first into a snow bank or an icy-cold mountain lake. Follow her on Twitter at @ShannonWHall.

• Chris Cox - USA

  Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA

  Chris Cox studied Environmental Science and Geography at the University of Idaho, receiving his PhD in 2013 with a focus on cloud-surface radiation interactions in Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland. From 2013 to 2014, he conducted post-doctoral work on atmospheric boundary-layer processes and isotope hydrology on the Greenland Ice Sheet at the University of Colorado before becoming a full time research scientist with CIRES, supporting the NOAA Physical Sciences Division in Boulder, Colorado. His research focuses on the processes that control the surface energy budget in the northern high latitudes, in particular those processes that pertain to melting and freezing of ice over coastal land, the Arctic ocean and the Greenland Ice Sheet.

• Martha Henriques - UK

  
  BBC Future, UK

  Martha Henriques is a senior journalist and commissioning editor at BBC Future, the international science and environment feature site for BBC Global News. She has particular interests in climate change, environment and human behaviour. She can be found on Twitter @Martha_Rosamund and at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

• Katarina Abrahamsson - Sweden

  University of Gothenburg, Sweden

• Marc Oggier - USA

  University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA

• Ying-Chih Fang - Taiwan

  Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

• Daniel Watkins - USA

  Oregon State University, USA

  Daniel Watkins is an Arctic climate scientist focusing on the response of the atmospheric boundary layer to changes in sea ice. Daniel's primary role aboard the Akademik Federov during the MOSAiC expedition was to coordinate the deployment of GPS buoys for the distributed network. He also organized and trained volunteers for the Ice Watch during the transits between stations. Currently, Daniel is doctoral student at Oregon State University advised by Dr. Jennifer Hutchings. Previously he earned a master's degree in Mathematics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics at Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, Idaho. He lives in Corvallis, OR.

• Allison Fong - USA

  Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany

• Josefine Lenz - Chair

  APECS Directorate Office / Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany

• Anja Sommerfeld

  MOSAiC Project Office / Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany

• Gerlis Fugmann

  APECS Directorate Office / Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany

• Andrea Schneider

  APECS Directorate Office / UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

• Lisa Grosfeld

  APECS Directorate Office / Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany

We want to thank the following projects and organisations for sponsoring the MOSAiC School 2019!