The Team

R. Max Holmes

Max Holmes, director of the Polaris Project, is a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He is an earth system scientist with broad interests in the responses and feedbacks of ecosystems to environmental change. Most of Max's current research takes place in the Arctic and addresses climate change impacts.

In 2008 and 2009, Max was also the Chesley Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor of Biology at Carleton College and recruited students from Carleton to the Polaris Project.

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. Jo is taking charge of determining the amount of student learning during 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 plays 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 at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He is an ecologist interested in how boreal forests impact the global cycling of carbon. 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 try to understand ecological production, recover native species, and predict the distribution of nonnative species. Recently, Sudeep has been working with emerging democratic societies in Mongolia and Bhutan to manage natural resources and conserve the world's large freshwater fish.

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 combines field measurements and satellite images to study links between the land, atmosphere, and oceans in the Arctic. Her most recent work focuses on permafrost thaw and impacts of sea ice on biological productivity.

You can read more about Karen here.

Chris Linder

Chris is a research associate at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a professional freelance photographer. Chris works on the Polaris Project to capture the scientific and educational aspects of the field course though still images, audio, and video. For the past seven years he has documented scientific field work in the polar regions and his work is published in books, scientific journals, and museum exhibits around the world.

You can read more about Chris and see some images here.

John Schade

John is an assistant professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is interested in how nutrients move from forests and grasslands into streams and lakes. John is also interested in the effects of anthropogenic environmental changes on freshwater ecosystems.

More about John here.

Bill Sobczak

Bill is an associate professor in the Biology Department at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has diverse research interests in freshwater ecology, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem restoration. 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 Yakutsk State University. He researches the age and origin of permafrost landscapes in Siberia.

Katey Walter

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

Katey is fluent in Russian 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 fascinating BBC article about the station and Zimov here.

Paul Mann

Paul recently finished his PhD in England and now is a postdoctoral scientist working with Max Holmes at the Woods Hole Research Center. He is working on the Global Rivers Project, investigating land-to-ocean transport and transformations of organic matter in 7 major rivers around the world (Congo, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Lena, Kolyma, and Fraser). In his first 6 months as a postdoc at the Woods Hole Research Center, Paul has spent more time in Africa and Siberia than in Woods Hole!

Jorien Vonk

Jorien has just finished her PhD at the Department of Applied Environmental Science at Stockholm University (Sweden) and now is a short-term postdoctoral researcher there, before starting her combined postdoctoral project at ETH (Zurich, Switzerland) and Woods Hole Research Center. Her main focus has been on terrestrial organic matter degradation in marine environments in Northern Scandinavia and the East Siberian and Laptev Seas. With the Polaris Project and during the next years, she will shift her research area to land, to study the actual terrestrial sources and their fluvial release pathways.