Team

R. Max Holmes

More about Max here.

Jo Beld

Jo is a professor of Political Science and Director of Evaluation and Assessment at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her teaching and research specializations include American politics, public policy, ethics, and social science research methods. Jo is taking charge of assessing student learning for the Polaris Project. This includes assessing learning of the students in the field course, but also students taking classes associated with the project and K-12 education related to student and team presentations.

You can see Jo's homepage here. Additional information about Jo's work in assessing student learning is available here.

Kate Bulygina

Kate is a research assistant at the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She works with Max Holmes on rivers around the Arctic and is also very active in education and outreach activities. Raised in the Soviet Union, Kate will play a vital role in the operation of the field course in Siberia.

You can see more about Kate here.

Andy Bunn

Andy is an assistant professor Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He is an ecologist interested in how boreal forest dynamics impact the global carbon cycle. In particular, Andy looks at recent growth trends in across the northern high latitudes using data from satellites and field measurements from trees. Andy has also done work on forest dynamics and paleoecology in the American West.

Andy's personal web page is here.

Sudeep Chandra

Sudeep is an assistant professor at the University of Nevada- Reno.  He enjoys working on projects whose aims are to understand the drivers of ecological production and its variability, recover native species, and predict the distribution of nonnative species.  Recently, Sudeep has been working with recently emerging democratic societies to develop natural resource management plans for their sensitive ecosystems and conserve the world's largest, freshwater fishes.

For more information please visit his laboratory site.

Karen Frey

Karen is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her research interests involve the combined use of field measurements, satellite remote sensing, and GIS to study large-scale linkages between land, atmosphere, ocean, and ice in high-latitude arctic environments.  Her most recent work focuses on impacts of permafrost thaw on river biogeochemistry and impacts of sea ice variability on biological productivity in shelf environments.

You can read more about Karen here.

John Schade

John is an assistant professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.  He is interested in interactions between nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in streams, and the effects of plant-soil interactions on on terrestrial nutrient cycling.  John has recently developed an interest in understanding the effects of anthropogenic environmental changes on stream nutrient
dynamics and is excited to have the opportunity to develop research experiences in the Arctic for his students and for himself.

More about John here.

Bill Sobczak

Bill is an assistant professor in the Biology Department at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has diverse research interests in freshwater ecology, ecosystem ecology, aquatic microbial ecology, biogeochemistry, and restoration ecology. Bill does work in a wide variety of aquatic habitats and ecosystems such as shallow groundwaters, mountain streams, lowland rivers, freshwater wetlands, tidal marshes, and large estuaries.

You can read more about Bill here.

Valentin Spektor

Valentin is a Research Scientist at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, Siberia. He is also a lecturer at Yakut State University. His research addresses the development of permafrost landscapes in Siberia.

Katey Walter

Katey Walter is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her primary research interests are carbon cycling and greenhouse gas emissions from aquatic ecosystems as well as their feedbacks to climate change.  Current projects involve estimating methane emissions from a variety of lake types in Alaska and Russia, with particular attention to the importance of thawing permafrost as a fuel for methane production.

Katey is fluent in Russian language and has lived and worked in Russia since 1992.

Sergei Zimov

Sergei Zimov is the director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy, Siberia. Founded in 1989, the station serves as a year-around base for research in the Siberian Arctic. Zimov is an active researcher with diverse interests related to the global carbon cycle.

You can read a Reuters article about Sergei and the Northeast Science Station here. And a fascinating BBC article here.