Polar Research Board Member Biographical Sketches

Diana Wall (Chair) is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the 2013 Laureate of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. She is currently Science Chair, Global Initiative. To understand the importance of soil biodiversity, she works at the physical limits to life in the Antarctic dry valleys where climate change effects are amplified and species diversity is much reduced compared to other soil ecosystems. Dr. Wall’s more than 25 years of research in the Antarctic continues to clarify the critical links between climate change and soil biodiversity. Her interdisciplinary research has uncovered dramatic impacts to invertebrate communities in response to climate change, the key role nematode species play in soil carbon turnover, and how they survive such extreme environments. Dr. Wall has combined her polar research with global scale field studies demonstrating that soil animals increase decomposition rates more in temperate and moist tropical climates than in cold and dry conditions, indicating a latitudinal gradient in their roles in ecosystems. Dr. Wall served as President of the Ecological Society of America, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the Society of Nematologists. Dr. Wall received the 2017 Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America, the 2016 Honorary Member award from the British Ecological Society, the 2015 Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin, the 2012 SCAR President’s Medal for Excellence in Antarctic Research and the 2013 Soil Science Society of America Presidential Award. Wall Valley, Antarctica was named in 2004 to recognize her research. She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the Society of Nematologists and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is the Inaugural Director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University. She received a B.A. in and Ph.D. in plant physiology at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Lawson Brigham is a Distinguished Fellow and Faculty in the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is also a Fellow at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy's Center for Arctic Study and Policy. During 2005-2009 he was chair of the Arctic Council’s Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment and Vice Chair of the Council’s working group on Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment. Dr. Brigham was a career U.S. Coast Guard officer, retiring with the rank of Captain. He served at sea in command of four Coast Guard cutters including the polar icebreaker Polar Sea sailing in Alaskan, Arctic & Antarctic waters; he also served as Chief of Strategic Planning. He has participated in more than 15 Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Dr. Brigham has been a research fellow at WHOI, a faculty member of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and Deputy Director of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. He holds graduate degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (MS) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil & PhD). His research interests have focused on the Soviet/Russian maritime Arctic, Arctic climate change, marine transportation, sea ice remote sensing, Arctic environmental protection, and polar geopolitics.

Pablo Clemente-Colón is an Oceanographer retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2017 after 38 years of federal service. While at NOAA, he also served as Chief Scientist of the U.S. National Ice Center, a joint agency formed by NOAA, Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard, where he functioned as Senior Scientific Advisor. Dr. Clemente-Colón has participated in icebreaking missions and sea ice field experiments in the Arctic including U.S. – Canada Joint Extended

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Continental Shelf mapping missions and has supported ice and snow monitoring research and operations globally. He was a contributor to the Arctic Council Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009 Report and has been instrumental in the resurgence and organization of the biennial Symposia on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations since 2007. He presently serves as Advisor to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and has continued his support of the International Arctic Buoy Programme and the International Programme for Antarctic Buoys.

Michael Gooseff is a Professor in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and in the Department of Civil Architectural & Environmental Engineering at the University of Colorado. He is currently the Lead Principal Investigator of the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER project and the Co-Director of the Hydrologic Sciences Graduate Program at Colorado University. Dr. Gooseff earned his PhD in Civil Engineering at University of Colorado, where his research focused on stream-groundwater exchanges in glacial meltwater streams of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. Dr. Gooseff conducts on-going research in Arctic Alaska, mostly from the Toolik Field Station, and continues research in Antarctica. Dr. Gooseff has served on the editorial boards of Eos, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Water Resources Research, and WIRES Water. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc., and he is active with the Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union. In 2011, he chaired an NSF review committee for Office of Polar Programs.

Nagruk Harcharek, an Alaskan Native, was born and raised in Utqiaġvik, Alaska. He attended Honolulu Community College and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University where he attained his Associates in Science and Bachelors of Science and Commercial Pilot Certificates. He worked as a commercial pilot for 3 years in Western, Alaska before joining UIC Science, LLC as a project Manager. He is now the Director of Barrow Operations and VP of UIC Lands.

Ted Scambos is a Senior Research Scientist at the Earth Science and Observation Center, and former Lead Scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), both a part of the University of Colorado Boulder. His areas of expertise include glaciology; remote sensing of the poles; climate change effects on the cryosphere; and Antarctic history. Some current research activities include: mapping global ice flow using Landsat satellites and evaluating changes in Antarctic ice sheet flow; evaluating the ability of images and laser altimetry to detect water movement beneath the ice sheets; understanding the processes that lead to rapid ice-shelf retreat and glacier acceleration; snow and atmosphere conditions on the East Antarctic Plateau; and ice-ocean interactions for large coastal glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. He has been on 20 field expeditions to Antarctica and its surrounding sea ice and icebergs. He serves as a frequent Science Editor for the Journal of Glaciology and Annals of Glaciology, and is a member of AGU, IGS, and the AAAS. He recently served on the NASEM committee for "A Strategic Vision for Antarctic and Southern Ocean Research." He is now working with NSF and the UK’s NERC to coordinate a major new research campaign on "The Future of Thwaites Glacier and its Contribution to Sea-level Rise." He has a PhD in Geoscience from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Kristen St. John is a Professor of Geology at James Madison University. She earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Geoscience from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on marine sediment records of iceberg and sea ice-rafted sediments, and on geoscience education. An active researcher in the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), she was a marine sedimentologist for several expeditions, and worked on samples from the Arctic, North Atlantic, and North Pacific. She is the co- chief scientist for the future Arctic Ocean Paleoceanography expedition (Arc-OP, IODP Exp. 377). Currently, she is serving on the U.S. Steering Committee for Scientific Ocean Drilling, and in the past year was a co-leader of the IODP NEXT workshop and the IODP workshop on Scientific Exploration of the Arctic and North Pacific. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Geoscience Education from 2012- 2017.

Lynne Talley is a Distinguished Professor of Physical in the Climate, Atmospheric Sciences, and Physical Oceanography division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, . Talley’s research focuses on the general circulation of the ocean and the role of various oceanic and atmospheric conditions that affect ocean currents and property distributions, and the role of the ocean in climate. Her work involves analysis of data from most of the world’s oceans, depicting the movement of heat, salinity, and water masses, and the formation of water masses, particularly in subpolar regions. Her particular emphasis over the last decade has been Southern Ocean processes. She is one of the principal investigators for the NSF-funded Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) program. Talley’s focus in SOCCOM has been on physical processes including circulation, heat, water mass transformation, mixing and sea ice that affect the biogeochemistry. Talley was a lead author of the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports Working Group I chapters on ocean observations. She has participated in multiple National Academies studies, the most recent being the 2017 Sustaining Ocean Observations to Understand Future Changes in Earth’s Climate. She previously participated in Future Science Opportunities in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (2011).

Merritt Turetsky is the Director and Associate Professor in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has more than 20 years of experience working in boreal and arctic ecosystems. Her work contributes to theoretical predictions of ecosystem structure and function, but it also applies to regulation of carbon in a global change world. Dr. Turetsky has played leading roles in the Permafrost Carbon Network, NASA's ABoVE campaign, and the recently formed Canadian Permafrost Association. She sits on the executive committees of several international research networks and was selected this year as a AAAS Leshner Science Engagement Fellow. She is passionate about northern ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Through her research and teaching, she hopes to train the next generation of scientists in the interdisciplinary skills required to tackle ongoing challenges in the north related to food and water security, energy sustainability, carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, and landscape change.

Ross Virginia is a Professor of Environmental Science and Director of the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. His research seeks to understand how climate change alters soil biodiversity and the cycling of carbon in Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems. He is co-lead scholar of the Fulbright Arctic Initiative and PI of the NSF Joint Science Education Project (Greenland) and the Joint Antarctic School Expedition (Chile, Antarctica) that seek to train and inspire the future generation of international polar scientists. He also studies the relationships between the disciplines of ecology, ecosystem science, and environmental law and policy. He is active in Arctic policy and global environmental issues as co-director of the University of the Arctic Institute for Arctic Policy, as a global fellow in the Wilson Center’s Polar Initiative, and as a member of the board of governors for Ilismatusarfik, the University of Greenland and the University of the Arctic.

Margaret Williams is Managing Director of World Wildlife Fund’s US Arctic field program, which entails leading a team of experts in climate change, wildlife biology, fisheries, oil and shipping, and communications to implement an international conservation strategy for the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Ms. Williams has a special interest in Russian conservation. She speaks Russian, and was founder and editor for twelve years of the quarterly journal Russian Conservation News. Before joining WWF in 1997, she worked as a consultant to the World Bank on biodiversity projects in Russia and Central Asia. She received a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Smith College and a Master's degree from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Margaret is currently a member of the board of the Alaska Oceans Observing System. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ex-Officio

Matthew Druckenmiller (U.S. Delegate to IASC) is a Research Scientist II at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Dr. Druckenmiller earned his doctorate in 2011 from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he combined geophysical monitoring with local knowledge to study how Iñupiat communities use and rely on a changing sea-ice environment. Matthew joined Rutgers University in summer 2015 to support the Sea Ice Action Team, however, is based at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, CO. Previously, Matthew was a PACE (Postdocs Advancing Climate Expertise) Fellow at NSIDC where he collaborated with Alaska’s North Slope Borough to investigate the impacts of Arctic sea ice loss on bowhead whales. With long-held interests in science policy, he has served as a Science Policy Fellow at the National Academies’ Polar Research Board (2005), a project manager at the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (2006), and a AAAS Science Policy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development (2013-2015).

Andrey Petrov (Alternate U.S. Delegate to IASC) is an Associate Professor of Geography, the Academic Director of the GeoTREE Center, and the Director of the ARCTICenter at the University of Northern Iowa. Dr. Petrov also serves as the President of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association. He received his PhD at the University of Toronto and is the Past-Chair of the Polar Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. His research primarily focuses on economic issues in northern communities and policies of regional development in the Arctic. Dr. Petrov also studies human- environment relationships and Arctic socio-ecological systems, and he leads a number of circumpolar research initiatives, including the NSF research coordination networks in Arctic sustainability (Arctic- FROST and Artic-COAST).

Deneb Karentz (U.S. Delegate to SCAR) is a professor at the University of San Francisco in the Departments of Biology and Environmental Science. She is a marine biologist with expertise in plankton ecology and ultraviolet (UV) photobiology. Dr. Karentz has been involved in field research in Antarctica since 1986, has been a member of many committees that act in an advisory capacity to the US Antarctic Program, is an instructor for the NSF Antarctic Biology Course (since 1994), spent two years at NSF as the associate program manager for Biology and Medicine in the Office of Polar Programs, and currently serves as a science advisor for the US delegation to the Committee on Environmental Protection/Antarctic Treaty System.

Allan Weatherwax (Alternate U.S. Delegate to SCAR) is senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at Merrimack College. Formerly dean of science and professor of physics at Siena College, Weatherwax holds a Ph.D. in physics from Dartmouth College and a B.S. in mathematical physics from Binghamton University. He has been the principal investigator on numerous National Science Foundation and NASA grants, and is currently co-director of the Firefly satellite mission, which is exploring the mysteries of gamma rays produced by lightning discharge.