Liz Bagshaw
Liz Bagshaw is an Associate Professor at the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. She is a glaciologist and biogeochemist and undertook her PhD in Antarctic biogeochemistry at the University of Bristol, followed by postdoctoral training in glaciology and aerospace engineering, also at Bristol. In 2014 she took up a lectureship in Aquatic Biogeochemistry at Cardiff University, where she was promoted to Reader in 2022. She returned to Bristol in 2023 to take up her current position in the Bristol Glaciology Centre, focusing on Arctic Environmental Change. She’s really interested in developing new methods to measure meltwater in the glacial environment, to understand glacier hydrology and microbial habitability. She’s worked in Antarctica for four seasons, Greenland for about 12 seasons, and tried some experiments in Svalbard and several Alpine locations.
Lisa Craw
Lisa started out studying structural geology in her home country of New Zealand, before discovering that ice is actually a rock, and moving to a PhD in glaciology at the University of Tasmania. She recently moved to Prifysgol Caerdydd (Cardiff University) to work with Mike and Jono on team Cryoegg. Lisa specialises in physical properties of ice, particularly microstructure and thermal properties and their effect on rheology. She had never touched a breadboard until six months ago.
Sam Doyle
Sam is a field glaciologist working for the University of Sheffield as a Research Associate and Aberystwyth University as a Lecturer. His research focusses on ice sheet subglacial hydrology and ice dynamics. He has expertise in GNSS, geophysics and borehole drilling and instrumentation including sensor design. He has extensive field experience in Greenland and has also worked in Nepal and Antarctica. In his spare time, he is a mountain rescue volunteer in North Wales.
Emma Fisher
Emma is an Ice Core Drilling Engineer at the British Antarctic Survey. She maintains, operates, and develops new drilling equipment to collect and analyse ice cores, and has worked in the Arctic and Antarctica. Previously she designed and tested bespoke instrumentation to improve the efficiency of jet engines. While her background is in mechanical engineering, she also has a broad range of experience of electrical systems, programming, and automation of equipment in extreme environments.
Donna Frater
Donna is a sedimentary geologist with expertise in exploration and operations in Australia, the Pacific and Africa. She has expertise in remote field logistics, drilling, camp setup and field safety. She has worked in remote Australia, Pacific Islands, Zimbabwe and has been to the Cape Adare area of Antarctica, including to the heritage Mawson and Scott Huts. She has followed a twenty year scientific and project management career by studying a Masters in Gender, Development and Globalization at LSE and contributing to inclusion and accessibility to STEM in the UK and Europe. She feels it is very important to broaden the accessibility to science and research to enable the broadest views, and solutions, of issues such as climate change and indigenous connection to land.
Jono Hawkins
Jono has a background in electronic engineering and concreted a fascination with snow, ice and radio waves during his PhD where he developed and tested a new ice-penetrating radar system to measure basal melting on Antarctic ice shelves. He has since worked at the British Antarctic Survey designing a radar for snow surveying and is currently employed at Cardiff University as an electronic engineer to design and test new instrumentation for glaciology.
Mike Prior-Jones
Mike is a research fellow at Cardiff University, and works to bring new technology into glaciology and cryospheric science. He studied electronic engineering, which led to a highly varied career that included working on computer graphics for TV football coverage, a domestic heating system based on heat pumps and solar panels, medical ultrasound, and a radioactive toaster. Back in 2005 he got the opportunity to go to Antarctica on an 18-month contract for the British Antarctic Survey, which led to a series of jobs in the polar regions, mostly as an engineer. However, in 2019 he moved from industry to academia, working with Liz Bagshaw on the Cryoegg project (a wireless subglacial probe) and then on his own programme of research on wireless instruments for studying glacier hydrology.
Emma Smith
Emma is Postdoc at the University of Leeds, working with geophysical techniques on glaciers and ice sheets. Emma is primarily a field glaciologist and has been lucky enough to spend time in Antarctica and the Arctic investigating ice dynamics and structure, using seismic and radar techniques. Emma originally started out studying electronic engineering, before realising she was better at using electronic instruments than building them, and retraining as a geophysicist. Working on the CryoSkills course has been an exercise in dredging the recesses of her brain for knowledge of electronics past!
Larissa van der Laan
Larissa is a postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, currently working on the impact of Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss on atmospheric circulation. She was trained as a glaciologist, having previously worked on glacier and snowpack modelling and observations, particularly in the Alps. She has done fieldwork in the Alps and the Arctic, and is excited to teach logistics and field planning, along with assisting on the other CryoSkills topics. Besides purely scientific work, Larissa is a (science) artist and passionate about science communication, working as the EGU Cryosphere Division outreach officer and blog editor.
TJ Young
TJ is a new Lecturer in Physical Geography and Remote Sensing at the University of St Andrews in bonny Scotland. TJ is a field glaciologist and has conducted/led fieldwork on both the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets over 15 times. TJ approaches glaciology through non-traditional applications of geophysical instruments—particularly ice-penetrating radars—to understand glacier dynamics. TJ came to glaciology by way of marine biology, and in a previous life was researching the population dynamics of seals and whales. TJ is originally from Taiwan.