Current USAPECS Board
Have a project you want to see happen? Interested in helping out with USAPECS? Get in touch and get involved! There are still open positions on the board.
Alex Thornton
Co-Chair
Ellyn Enderlin
Co-Chair, Project Lead
Ellyn received her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2013 and is now employed as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Maine. Her research projects focus on developing an improved understanding of marine-terminating glacier behavior in response to climate forcing and glacier-ocean interactions. Her ongoing research projects include a comparative analysis of Columbia Glacier in Alaska and Helheim Glacier in SE Greenland and an interdisciplinary investigation of iceberg melting in Greenland's glacial fjords.
Olivia Lee
Alaska/PNW Rep.
Olivia is a Postdoc Research Associate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her research focuses on identification and use of sea ice as habitat for walrus and bearded seals using local traditional knowledge and remote sensing. She is also involved in science educational outreach, and works with the Study of Environmental Arctic Change Program (SEARCH) and ARCUS on topics such as the Arctic Observing Network.
Chelsea Thompson
Project Lead
Chelsea is a NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. As a postdoc, Chelsea studies atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons at Summit, Greenland and investigates impacts of long-range pollution on Arctic air and snow. Much of her research has focused on atmospheric chemistry and air-snow/ice interactions in the Arctic, as well as long-range transport of mid-latitude pollution to the Polar Regions. She received her PhD in 2012 from Purdue, during which time she spent two field seasons in Alaska studying halogen chemistry and halogen activation from coastal snow and sea ice surfaces as part of the Ocean-Atmosphere-Sea Ice-Snowpack field campaign.
Alice Bradley
Former Co-Chair
Alice is a Ph.D. student at University of Colorado Boulder, studying sea ice - ocean - atmosphere interactions in the context of ice formation and in areas with partial sea ice cover. Most of her research uses unmanned aircraft as a sensing platform. Before this, she grew up in Alaska and did her undergrad at Dartmouth College.
She is also active in APECS at the international level, and she spends a lot of time enjoying the Colorado outdoors.
Shelley Knuth
Project Lead
Shelley received her PhD from the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she researched air-sea interactions in the Terra Nova Bay region of Antarctica. She currently is a Senior Research Data Specialist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she assists researchers with data management and processing.
Jeff Bowman
Organizational Liaison
Jeff is a postdoctoral fellow in the Biology and Paleo Environment Division of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. His research is focused on the interactions between bacteria and phytoplankton during phytoplankton blooms in the coastal West Antarctic Peninsula region. He received his PhD in Oceanography and Astrobiology from the University of Washington where he studied the microbial ecology of sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
Mia Bennett
Outreach Project Lead
Mia is a PhD student at UCLA, where she researches the pathways and processes of Arctic natural resource and infrastructure development. Currently, she is working with satellite imagery of the Earth at night to track changes in levels of Arctic development since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her MPhil dissertation at Cambridge University's Scott Polar Research Institute examined Asian interests in the Arctic. Mia also runs the Cryopolitics blog, and her work appears regularly in publications such as The Maritime Executive and The Alaska Dispatch. She works to build public
awareness about the Arctic and assists with outreach for USAPECS.
Mariama Dryak
APECS National Committee Representative
Mariama is a M.Sc. student studying in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences and Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. There her research focuses on measuring iceberg melt variability and studying ice-ocean interactions around the Antarctic Peninsula. Before moving to Maine she completed her B.A. at the Durham University in the UK, where she studied physical geography and archaeology, specifically focusing on the response of glaciers to climate in Iceland.