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Gail Fondahl
IASSA President
University of Northern British Columbia
Prince George, British Columbia, CanadaGail Fondahl is Professor of Geography at the University of Northern British Columbia, and served as UNBC's Vice-President of Research, 2008-2012. Heading to graduate school to study Moscow’s urban morphology, Gail soon became more interested in indigenous cultural geography of the Russian North. She examined the effect of the Baykal-Amur (BAM) railway construction on Evenki reindeer husbandry in Transbaykalia for her Ph.D. (U.C. Berkeley), then focused more broadly to indigenous land rights and legal geography in the Russian North.
Gail has also carried out co-managed research on sustainable resource management with Tl’azt’en Nation in northern British Columbia. She has been involved in organizing two International Summer Schools on Indigenous Rights, led by Natalia Novikova of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. Gail is involved in the Arctic Social Indicators project, and serves as one of the co-leads on the Arctic Human Development Report 2. She has been a member of IASSA since 1992.
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Gunhild Ninis Rosqvist
Professor Gunhild Ninis Rosqvist is specialized in the effect of environmental and climate change in alpine and polar areas. She has studied the effect of climate change on glaciers and the alpine terrestrial and limnological environment both in the Arctic and in the Antarctic. She is a professor at Stockholm University, Sweden and at Bergen University, Norway.
She is also the director of Tarfala Research Station, which is run by the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University. Tarfala is located in the Kebnekaise mountains, northern Swedish Lapland. The main focus of research and monitoring has been the effect of climate change on glaciers but studies of permafrost, terrestrial and limnological environments is also carried out in Tarfala. Tarfala is part of the EU funded infrastructure project INTERACT which provides excellent opportunities for networking among polar scientists.
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Svetlana Usenyuk
Svetlana Usenyuk is a Postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland. Prior to that, she was a doctoral student and part-time teacher at the School of Arctic Design, Ural State Academy of Architecture and Art (USAAA), Ekaterinburg, Russia. She graduated as a PhD in 2011, under the supervision of Professor Nikolai Garin, with the dissertation "Arctic Design: the Principle of Co-creation for Transport Vehicles". Her current project "Arctic Technologies of Adaptation and Survival: Traditions and Innovations" is intended to reveal the patterns of human mobility in extreme environment through man-made things, developed by indigenous nomads in Scandinavia and Russia.
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Heidi McCann
Heidi McCann is an Associate Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center where she is the Knowledge Exchange Coordinator on the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA) project. She is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder Museum and Field Studies Program where she focused her studies on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) legislation specializing in museum consultation relationships with American Indian Tribes. She has worked with her tribe as an American Indian Cultural Resource Specialist focusing on language and culture preservation and revitalization. She has many years of experience working and collaborating with American Indian Tribes and Alaska Natives and is active in collaborating with the Boulder/Denver American Indian community, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society student group, Oyate Indigenous student group and the Native American Law Student Association at CU Boulder on cultural events and activities. She is an active member in the American Indian Studies Faculty group and the Native American Indigenous Studies Graduate Certificate working group at CU Boulder. She is an enrolled member of the Yavapai-Apache Nation (a sovereign American Indian tribe in the United States).
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Peter Pulsifer
Peter Pulsifer is a geographer with a focus on the user-centered application of geographic information technology for the polar regions. For more than five years Dr. Pulsifer has worked in support of Arctic communities to facilitate the sharing of local observations and traditional knowledge. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic project (ELOKA, http://eloka-‐arctic.org) hosted at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), at the University of Colorado. Before coming to NSIDC, Peter was a doctoral candidate and postdoctoral fellow at the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Carleton University where he co-‐led the data and knowledge management aspects of the International Polar Year Inuit Sea Ice Use and Occupancy Project (http://gcrc.carleton.ca/isiuop/). Dr. Pulsifer has been active in polar data management for almost a decade and has served on and advised a number of committees and activities including the Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks program.
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Colleen Ann Strawhacker
Colleen Strawhacker is a Council for Library and Information Research (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado. As a part of her position at NSIDC, Dr. Strawhacker will be working with the Exchange for Local Observations in the Arctic (ELOKA) and theAdvanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS) to define management strategies for social science data from the Arctic and to ensure those data are properly curated.
Prior to joining NSIDC, she received her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a focus in Archaeology at Arizona State University. Using archaeology and ecology as lenses to understand long-term human and environment interactions, Dr. Strawhacker combines methods and theories from both anthropology and environmental science to investigate how societies in the past responded to external social and environmental forces, such as climate change or colonizing groups. While much of her research during graduate school focused on how people adapted to warm-weather deserts, she is expanding her research on the recursive relationship between humans and the environment to the Arctic in collaboration with NSIDC and the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization.
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Else Grete Broderstad
Else Grete has been the administrative director of the Centre for Sami Studies for the periods 1992-1997 and 2001-2010. Her dissertation in political science was completed in 2008 - Indigenous Rights and Citizenship Rights within and across the Borders of the Nation-State. In the period February 2008-June 2010 she served as a coordinator on the Arctic Governance Project. She has been chairing the Fávllis project and been associated to the project Arctic Tipping Points. She is also a scholar at theTUNDRA and Finnmark landscape projects at the University of Tromsø. From January 2013 Else Grete is the academic director of the Centre for Sami Studies.
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Dmitriy Berezhkov
Dmitry is Itelmen from Kamchatka peninsula from the Russian Far East. For many years he worked in Russian Association of the indigenous peoples of the North (Raipon) which is the umbrella organization for Russian indigenous peoples. In 2004 he was elected as a vice-president of Raipon and since 2006 also worked as an executive director of Raipon in Moscow. In 2011 leaved the position in Raipon and moved to Norway where entered to the Tromso University on Master program on indigenous studies.