Graduate Student in Marine Biology - University of Alaska Fairbanks
Lauren Bell is a master's student in marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. On this cruise, she is working with Katrin Iken and Bodil Bluhm to assess epibenthic community and food web structure across the Chukchi Sea via bulk stable isotope analysis. Lauren received her B.S. in marine biology from Stanford University in 2011 with undergraduate thesis work focused on the chromatic behavior and locomotion of the Humboldt squid. Her research interests include invertebrate community structure, trophic organization, and behavioral ecology.
Research Associate Professor in Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography - University of Alaska Fairbanks
Bodil Bluhm is a Research Associate Professor in Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has worked in the Arctic for the past 15 years and has spent over a year combined sea time. Her primary interests are in benthic and sea ice ecology, biodiversity, food webs, population dynamics and ice-pelagic-benthic coupling. During the RUSALCA 2012 cruise, Dr. Bluhm will work on the epibenthic community structure and food web with her colleague Dr. Iken and graduate student Lauren Bell. For that purpose, the team will quantify and identify the invertebrate fauna from the beam trawl hauls, and collect pelagic and benthic invertebrates from various gears for biochemical analysis of the tissue composition indicative of trophic levels and food sources.
Teacher - Teacher Advisory Council – The National Academies
Betty Carvellas retired in 2007 after teaching science for 39 years at the middle and high school levels. She was a founding member of the National Academies Teacher Advisory Council (TAC) and currently serves as the Teacher Leader for the TAC. Her interests include interdisciplinary teaching, connecting “school” science to the real world, and bringing the practice of science into the classroom. Throughout her career, she traveled extensively on her own and with students. Her professional service includes work at the local, state, and national levels. She served as co-chair of the education committee and was a member of the executive board of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and is a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers. Included among her awards are the Outstanding Science Teacher-Vermont (1981), Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (1984), and a Christa McAuliffe fellowship. Betty has participated in seven research expeditions in the Arctic. In 2008, she was designated a lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies.
Ph.D. Student - University of Alaska Fairbanks/Shirshov Institute of Oceanology
Elizaveta Ershova recieved her M.S. degree at Moscow State University, where her work focused on the ecology, reproductive biology, and functional morphology of copepods of the family Metridinidae. Since very early in her studies, Elizaveta developed a passion for work at sea and for the Polar Regions. Elizaveta has been a participant of RUSALCA since 2009, working under the supervision of Dr. Russ Hopcroft and Dr. Ksenia Kosobokova. Currently, she is a joint Ph.D. student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, Russia, splitting her time between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Moscow, Russia. The bulk of her dissertation work is done within the scope of the RUSALCA project, where she examines the zooplankton communities of the Chukchi Sea region.
Lab Technician - Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science
Becky Garley gained her bachelor's degree in ocean and earth science at Liverpool University, UK, and her master's degree at Southampton University, UK. Becky has been a lab technician at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science in Dr. Nicholas Bates' lab for two and a half years. The lab researches the ocean carbon system across the global oceans to try and discover its processes and controls. During the Russian-U.S. Arctic Census 2012 expedition, Becky will be collecting seawater samples for dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity to be analysed on return to the lab in Bermuda.
Fisheries Oceanographer - Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Brenda Holladay is a fisheries oceanographer with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she received a B.S. in biology and M.S. in fisheries oceanography. She has studied distribution, abundance, community structure, and trophic ecology of larval and demersal fishes throughout Alaskan waters for 23 years, and for the past eight years has focused on Arctic fishes of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Holladay is co-principal investigator of the fisheries ecology research on RUSALCA, with principal investigator Dr. Brenda Norcross, also a fisheries oceanographer of Institute of Marine Science, and senior contributor and ichthyoplankton scientist Morgan Busby of the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service. Holladay leads the onboard fisheries ecology team that includes Kelly Walker and Dr. J. Andres Lopez.
The fisheries ecology project continues the time series community assessment that was established at sites sampled during 2004 and 2009 RUSLACA cruises by documenting all life stages of fishes, including ichthyoplankton, juvenile, and adult demersal fishes. Fishes have rarely been studied in the Chukchi Sea. The fish ecology project RUSALCA cruises establishes baseline information on abundance and age structure needed to assess potential changes in fish communities as climate change.
Professor - Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Dr. Russ Hopcroft is a Professor at the University of Alaska's Institute of Marine Science in Fairbanks (UAF). He grew up fascinated by aquatic life (and Jacques Cousteau specials) and pursued this fascination throughout his education. Dr. Hopcroft received his Master’s degree in 1988 and his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The focus of his graduate research was on plankton ecology in the tropical waters surrounding Jamaica. From 1997 to 1999, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where he was heavily involved in the use of remotely operated vehicles and traditional oceanographic surveys to study the oceans. He pursues a broad array of research interests, concentrating on the composition, production, and energy flow of the planktonic trophic levels that ultimately shape the structure of all marine communities.
Since joining UAF in 2000, his focus has shifted to Arctic and subarctic planktonic communities with an emphasis on Alaskan waters. Much of his lab’s activity focuses on understanding the linkage between climate and zooplankton communities. In addition to traditional emphasis on crustaceans zooplankton (copepods and euphausiids), he also works on the broad array of soft-bodied zooplankton groups such as jellyfish, the larvacean pelagic tunicates, and most pelagic snails (pteropods and heteropods). He has served on the steering committee of several Census of Marine Life projects, including the Arctic Ocean Biodiversity project, the Census of Antarctic marine Life, and the global Census of Marine Zooplankton. He is increasingly recognized for his images of live zooplankton that are widely distributed in the media and on the web.
Associate Professor in Marine Biology - University of Alaska Fairbanks
Katrin Iken is an Associate Professor in Marine Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is fascinated by the polar regions, having worked in Antarctic waters between 1996 and 2001 and in the Arctic since 2002. So far, she has participated in about 22 research cruises to the Antarctic, the Arctic and the Deep-Sea. Her background is in benthic ecology, especially trophic interactions and food web studies. Dr. Iken will be part of the epibenthic and food web team on board the Khromov (with Dr. Bluhm and her student Bell) and within the RUSALCA project. She will collect benthic and pelagic invertebrates and study how they form the food web and how this differs across different regions of the study area.
Postdoctoral Fellow - Chesapeake Biological Laboratory University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Monika Kedra is postdoctoral fellow at Chesapeake Biological Laboratory Center for Environmental Science University of Maryland . Her scientific interests include structure and functioning of Arctic marine ecosystems, with a main focus on benthic population dynamics, ecology, and functioning. Additionally, she is interested in benthic food webs and carbon cycling. During her Ph.D., she investigated climate change effects on benthic marine macrofauna in Svalbard fjords, in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic Ocean. Currently, she concentrates her work in the Pacific-influenced ecosystems of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Her special interests include taxonomy of polychaetes and sipunculans.
P.P.Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Assistant Professor - Pusan National University
Dr. Sang Heon Lee is a polar biological oceanographer currently working in Pusan National University in South Korea after receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr. Lee's specific interests are dynamics of major inorganic dissolved nutrient concentration, primary and new productions, geographic size compositions of primary producers, and physiological and/or nutritional conditions of phytoplankton and ice algae based on photosynthetic-end products in the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans.
ISGramberg VNII Okeangeologia, St. Petersburg, Russia
Fish Systematist - University of Alaska Fairbanks - University of Alaska Museum and School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences
Dr. Sang HeoAndrés López is a fish systematist focusing on evolutionary and genealogical relationships among fish species and populations. He completed graduate work in Fisheries (M.S.) at the University of Washington and in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Ph.D.) at Iowa State University. His now an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where he is the curator of the fish and marine invertebrate research collections of the University of Alaska Museum. Members of his lab use evidence from genetics to uncover present and historical relationships between groups of fish to improve knowledge of how biology, geography, and history shape the distribution of biological diversity. n Lee is a polar biological oceanographer currently working in Pusan National University in South Korea after receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr. Lee's specific interests are dynamics of major inorganic dissolved nutrient concentration, primary and new productions, geographic size compositions of primary producers, and physiological and/or nutritional conditions of phytoplankton and ice algae based on photosynthetic-end products in the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans.
Ph.D. Candidate - University of Tromsø, Norway
Arve Lynghammar is a Ph.D. candidate working at the Department of Arctic and Marine Biology in Tromsø, Norway. His research interests are taxonomy, population genetics, and ecology of Arctic skate species. Normally, he is fishing in the Atlantic Ocean, such as Greenland, Svalbard, Jan Mayen, and the Barents Sea. On this cruise, he is involved in DNA barcoding of Arctic fishes, as well as improving current fish identification guides in cooperation with Catherine Mecklenburg.
ISGramberg VNII Okeangeologia, St. Petersburg, Russia
Research Associate - California Academy of Sciences
For more than 35 years, Catherine (Kitty) Mecklenburg has been studying and writing about the marine fishes of Alaska and adjacent Arctic seas. Curatorial support for her collections is provided by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, where she is a Research Associate with the Department of Ichthyology. Her home base is Point Stephens Research, just north of Juneau, Alaska, where she and her physiologist-GIS expert husband and coauthor, Tony, live and conduct research under contracts with state and federal agencies. A major accomplishment with her as lead author (collaborators T.A. Mecklenburg and L.K. Thorsteinson) was the monograph Fishes of Alaska,published in 2002. She is the author or coauthor of several taxonomic reviews in the series California Academy of Sciences Annotated Checklists of Fishes. Her most recent significant paper as lead author is a circumpolar review using original data on species presence and DNA barcoding, as well as the recent literature, of the taxonomy and distribution of Arctic marine fishes (in Marine Biodiversity with P.R. Møller and D. Steinke, 2011). Primarily with the support of the RUSALCA program, she has been working on an atlas and identification guide tentatively titled, Fishes of the northern Bering Sea, East Siberian, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas and adjacent deep waters of the Arctic Ocean. She has participated in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cruises to the Semidi Islands, Gulf of Alaska; Norton Sound, Bering Sea; Pribilof Islands, Bering Sea; the central Aleutian Islands; and a NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service fish survey in the Chukchi Sea in 2007. She participated in the RUSALCA interdisciplinary cruises of 2004 and 2009, and her sampling supplies have been sent and await her in Nome for the 2012 cruise. While resampling at continental shelf stations is important to maintain a series of samples over time to assess change, for the 2012 cruise she is particularly eager to reach the new, unexplored northernmost stations where the most interesting discoveries are likely to be made.
Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Research Associate - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Susan Mills is a research associate at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Usually, she studies larval dispersal in coastal and deep-sea invertebrates, but on the Russian-U.S. Arctic Census 2012 cruise, Susan will be collecting data on zooplankton distribution and abundance for Carin Ashjian at WHOI using the Video Plankton Recorder (VPR).
Group Alliance, Russia, Russian Federation
St. Petersburg State University
Research Associate - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Assistant, Group of Polar Oceanography - P.P.Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Ph.D. Student - University of Alaska Fairbanks
Imme Rutzen received her diploma in biology in 2008 from the Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany. Later in 2008, she started a Ph.D. in marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with Dr. Russ Hopcroft as her advisor. Her research focus is on the prediction of distribution and abundance of zooplankton in the Arctic Ocean.
Institute of Microbiology Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Principal Oceanographer - Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington
Dr. Kate Stafford is a Principal Oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington. Dr. Stafford’s research focuses on the use of passive acoustic monitoring to study geographic and seasonal variation and migrations of marine mammals. Much of her research has involved examining the geographic and seasonal occurrence of large whales based on sound production and the integration of these data with environmental variables. Currently most of her work is based in the Arctic, including the Beaufort, Chukchi, and Bering Seas, and focuses on bowhead and beluga whales.
Research Associate III, Physical Oceanography - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Marshall Swartz is a research associate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Insitution, where he investigates the development of low-cost sensor and sampling platforms; oceanographic temperature and conductivity; calibration standards and procedures; towed camera systems; and lab and in-situ instrument performance variation. Marshall has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University and an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan.
Ornithologist - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Troy Ecological Research Associates
Declan Troy works for his own biological research company (Troy Ecological Research Associates) based in Alaska. His research has focused on Arctic and marine birds primarily in Alaska and Arctic Canada. During the RUSCALA study, he will be surveying marine birds on behalf of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Management.
Institute of the Earth's crust of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, Irkutsk, Russia
Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Technician - University of Alaska Fairbanks
Kelly Walker received her B.Sc. in Fisheries from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in May 2011. After working in freshwater fisheries for a summer, she joined the team working in the Fisheries Oceanography lab under Dr. Brenda Norcross in the fall of 2011. Her main duties in the lab include processing and aging otoliths from Arctic marine fish species collected during the lab’s short, but busy, field season. Her primary research interest is age class distribution of Arctic marine fishes. On this cruise she’ll be helping Brenda Holladay with fish and zooplankton processing.
Director of the Institute of Marine Science and Professor - University of Alaska Fairbanks
Terry E. Whitledge is the Director of the Institute of Marine Science and Professor within the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His research specialty is chemical/biological oceanography and he has actively worked in Alaskan waters for the past 35 years with regard to understanding nutrient processes that support marine primary production in estuarine and coastal waters of the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea, and the western Arctic Ocean.
Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
