SCAR is pleased to announce that the 2017 recipients of the SCAR Visiting Professor awards are Professor Yeadong Kim from South Korea, Dr Dermot Antoniades from Canada and Drs Xavier Crosta and Yves Cherel both from France. SCAR has been able to award extra Visiting Professorships in 2017 thanks to the kind support of India, Norway and Switzerland.
Prof Kim will visit the ITU Polar Research Center in Turkey. He aims to share his experience in the aspects of environmental protection and safety relevant to the members of the Turkish Antarctic expedition and advise on the developing research plans that properly reflect these important elements. While primarily aimed at supporting researchers and operators, the visit will include education and outreach more widely through public lectures for both early career scientists and the general public. Turkey joined SCAR as an Associate Member in 2016.
Dr Antoniades will be hosted by the Universided de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay. He will travel as an instructor with a small group of students to the Artigas Base on King George Island as part of the “Initiation to Antarctic Research” summer field school. While at the base, he will also introduce a PhD student to Antarctic fieldwork. Upon his return to Montevideo he will build on the considerable public and media interest in the first summer school to share his experience with researchers and students with little or no previous Antarctic experience.
Dr Crosta will visit the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research (NCAOR) in Goa, India. Building on previous collaborative work, he will share his experience with colleagues and students in (i) diatom taxonomy, (ii) statistical approaches to produce quantitative estimates of sea surface temperature and sea ice conditions and (iii) Southern Ocean paleoceanography. He will also deliver a series of public lectures while at NCAOR and visit other relevant institutions in Goa to investigate the possibilities for further collaboration with his home institution.
Dr Cherel will visit the Port Elizabeth Museum in South Africa. He will train the curator and other biologists in key features of beak morphology to identify Southern Ocean cephalopods as prey. This will in turn, allow training of a large number of South African students. He will also contribute to work establishing an up-to-date reference collection of beaks from Southern Ocean cephalopods for South Africa, including an exchange of beaks with a French reference collection. As part of the visit Dr. Cherel will give two seminars and a public lecture on his work at the Port Elizabeth Museum, organized in conjunction with the Algoa Bay Hope Spot initiative and the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa. This program hosts regular public talks of an environmental and scientific nature with a wider audience.
The SCAR Visiting Professor Scheme is directed at mid- to late-career researchers and academics, enabling them to undertake a short-term visit to another SCAR member country, to share their experience by providing training and mentoring. The scheme is focused on strengthening the research capacity of countries with smaller or less well-developed Antarctic research programmes. The ultimate goal of the scheme is to promote capacity building in the host country and to develop long-term links and partnerships, leading to advances in Antarctic research. Full details of the scheme are available in the Visiting Professors section of the SCAR website.
Previous Visiting Professors from countries with well-developed Antarctic research programmes, such as Australia, the United States and the UK, have visited a variety of countries to provide training and mentoring, including Chile, South Africa, Iran, the Republic of Korea, Argentina and India. For full details of previous exchanges, see the Visiting Professor Awardees page.