APECS has been working again this year together with our partner Arctic Frontiers on creating opportunities for early career researchers at the upcoming Arctic Frontiers 2015 “Climate and Energy” conference in Tromsø from 18 - 23 January 2015. We are happy to announce our three representatives for the science committees for the conference:
Part 1: Arctic climate change - global implications
Dr. Inga May (Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany): Inga studied physical Geography at the University of Munich. She rapidly realized her passion for the Polar Regions and hence started a PhD together with INRS in Quebec, Canada, about permafrost in the Arctic. During this time she was heavily involved in many International Permafrost Association (IPA), APECS and Permafrost Young Researcher Network (PYRN) activities. In 2011 she successfully finished her PhD and worked for 1 ½ a year as the Executive Director for the International Permafrost Association. She is now working as research assistant at the Alfred-Wegener Institution for Polar and Marine research and in the EU project Page21 dealing with the consequences of climate change in Arctic Regions.
Part 2: Ecological winners and losers in future Arctic marine ecosystems
Mar Fernandez Mendez (Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany): Mar is a biologist by training who has always been fascinated by the ocean. After her masters in Marine Microbiology at the Max Planck Institute in Bremen she decided to specialize on the group of marine microorganisms responsible for carbon fixation: phytoplankton. Now she is at the end of her PhD at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven trying to understand the biological carbon cycle in the rapidly changing Arctic Ocean. Her aim in the long term is to be able to predict how primary production in the Arctic will change due to global warming.
Part 3: The Arctic's role in the global energy supply and security
Coco Smits (Royal HaskoningDHV, The Netherlands): Coco is currently working as an environmental & social policy consultant for the international engineering consultancy firm Royal HaskoningDHV. She has a Masters degree in Environmental Policy from the Wageningen University in The Netherlands, during which she studied the governance of oil, gas and mining development in Greenland and the wider Arctic. She continued working in the field of Arctic resources next to other projects in the oil and gas sector when she started working for Royal HaskoningDHV. Her work is focussed on the interaction between societies and the environment, and she is interested in how developments in the Arctic fit in the global resource picture.
If you are planning on attending the Arctic Frontiers 2015 conference on "Climate and Energy", the call for abstracts is out at http://www.arcticfrontiers.com/2015-conference/science-section. Abstract submission deadline is 22 September 2014!
