The Institute of Arctic Studies and the Stefansson Arctic Institute of Iceland collaborate to present the annual Stefansson Memorial Lectures, delivered in commemoration of the life, work, and vision for the Arctic of explorer and anthropologist Vilhjálmur Stefansson.
As the Arctic has increasingly become the center of political, economic, environmental, and strategic discourse, the nations and peoples have had to contend with rapidly changing times. The President offers his reflections on this subject, and how Iceland continues to maneuver through the challenging political waters of a transforming world.
Anthropologist Thomas McGovern, Hunter College, City University of New York, has done archaeological fieldwork in the UK, Norway, France, the Caribbean, and NE US, but his main research work has been in the North Atlantic (Greenland, Iceland, Faeroes, and Shetland). McGovern was one of the founders of the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO, www.nabohome.org), and has served as NABO coordinator to the present. This international regional research cooperative has sponsored collaborative science, education, and outreach work from arctic Norway to Labrador, and its website now provides rich resources for science and education. In 2009 NABO was funded by NSF to explore the possibilities of taking this collaborative model global by connecting other regional interdisciplinary teams working in longterm human ecodynamics. McGovern is associate director of the Human Ecodynamics Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (http://herc.gc.cuny.edu/ ) and has served on multiple NSF and international panels on arctic and interdisciplinary research
Andrew Revkin is one of America's most honored science writers and has spent nearly a quarter century covering subjects ranging from Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami to the assault on the Amazon, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change in the North Pole. He has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995, a job that has taken him to the Arctic three times in three years. In 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the pole. He spearheaded a three-part Times series and one-hour documentary in 2005 on the transforming Arctic. In 2003, his climate coverage won the first National Academies Communication Award for print journalism, presented by the nation's eminent scientific body.