Following Woodwell’s ‘North Stars’

Dr. Blaize Denfeld

Polaris Years 2009, 2010

Throughout her career, Dr. Blaize Denfeld has made her decisions based on spark.

“I feel like every step of the way, something I’ve done has sparked something in me that I realize, ‘maybe this is the next step that I want to pursue.’ So it’s been an interesting journey starting with the Polaris project to today,” says Dr. Denfeld.

After completing the Polaris Project and her undergraduate studies, she applied for a Ph.D. program in Sweden, thinking “I was in Siberia for a month and a half, I can live in a foreign country for a few years.”  It was there she felt a spark for the aspects of science that involved collaboration and coordination, so she accepted her next position at NASA’s Earth science division. After NASA, she felt the spark for combining science and policy and moved on to the US Global Change Research Program, and finally, her current position as Deputy Director of the Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science (SITES). SITES runs nine ecological research stations across Sweden that monitor the Arctic and Boreal environment. Some of the stations contain ice records that extend back to the 1940s, which Dr. Denfeld says provide a powerful image of just how much the climate is changing.

In her current role, Dr. Denfeld coordinates scientific collaborations across all SITES’s research stations. For Dr. Denfeld, the best part of her position, and of all the jobs she’s held, has been her fellow scientists.

“I think for me it always comes back to the people and the collaborations. Of all the positions I’ve had, the thing I enjoy the most is getting to work with passionate people that are really intelligent and have really good ideas,” says Dr. Denfeld.

Dr. Denfeld says that, whatever direction her career takes next, she hopes to be a model for other women in STEM.

“As my career has progressed, I’ve benefited from really strong women in science, and so I feel a stronger passion now for paying it back for all the female scientists that helped me get to where I am now.”

Emily Sturdivant

Polaris Year 2011

Emily Sturdivant joined the 2011 Polaris expedition to Siberia with an interest in GIS and an open mind about where the experience might lead. Her project involved collecting data on carbon fluxes with a homemade flux chamber that she would later use to ground truth satellite data observations.

“I would go out to a patch of water, anything from a tiny stream to a lake, tip my bucket upside down onto the water and track the change in gas concentration inside the bucket as I measured wind speed and other variables in the surroundings,” Sturdivant says.

Sturdivant recalls the days of field work alternating between chaos and tranquility.

“One of my favorite memories is of when another participant and I headed out to collect samples at a lake across the river from the barge where we were bunked. They dropped us off with an inflatable boat that, along with my bucket and other equipment, we hauled through the bushes and pumped up with one foot or the other sinking through the vegetation,” Sturdivant says. “After the chaos of setting up, drifting on the lake as we collected our measurements in the midst of the wilderness was so peaceful.”

Darcy L. Peter

Polaris Years 2017, 2018, 2019

The universe seemed to conspire around Darcy Peter to bring her to the Polaris Project. The application was forwarded to her by professors and friends alike and she soon found herself on the 2017 expedition examining greenhouse gas emissions from water bodies in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Peter is a Koyukon & Gwich’in Athabascan from the village of Beaver, Alaska and during that summer, she noticed the Polaris Project did not have much interaction with the Indigenous communities nearby. She brought this feedback to Woodwell Arctic Program Director Dr. Sue Natali.

“I said if Polaris is going to continue for years, we need to have a relationship with the people, and if we are going to train the next generation of Arctic scientists, we should be making sure the research questions we are forming are impacting Alaska Natives in a positive way,” says Peter.

Peter returned as a student mentor in 2018 and worked with Dr. Natali to implement changes to the program that would build stronger relationships with locals in the community of Bethel where Polaris participants stay before heading out to the field site.

Peter organized a meeting where scientists and students could listen to the concerns of community members and apply them to students’ projects. Peter also went on the local radio station to promote the meeting and spearheaded the creation of a newsletter about the project that was translated into Yupik, the traditional language spoken in the region. She volunteered her time in 2019 to lead the community meeting in Bethel again, and joined Woodwell full-time as a Research Assistant in 2020.

“The first community meeting in Bethel was very impactful—seeing seasoned, more experienced scientists have questions for the community… I think it really painted the picture for a lot of the scientists traveling with us that year of the power their research has to truly help people,” Peter says.

Peter is now the face of Woodwell in Alaska, working from Fairbanks surrounded by friends and family to continue building bridges between Woodwell and Alaska Native communities and non-profits, as well as facilitating the Center’s ongoing Arctic fieldwork. She says she intends to dedicate her career to ensuring science is conducted ethically, in a way that benefits people.

“All research has the power to affect change,” Peter says. “What good is research if it only benefits other researchers? I want to keep serving Alaska Native communities and amplifying the voices of my people and my relations, whose voices have been put down their entire lives.”

Dr. Bianca Rodríguez-Cardona

Polaris Years 2017, 2019

Dr. Bianca Rodríguez-Cardona was an experienced Arctic researcher by the time she joined Polaris in 2017. She had been conducting her Ph.D. research on how fires influence stream chemistry in Russia’s Central Siberian Plateau when she heard about the program from Dr. John Schade, one of Polaris’s founding faculty members, at an AGU meeting, and he convinced her to apply.

Dr. Rodríguez-Cardona was confident in her field skills when she arrived in Alaska that summer. But the tundra of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta was different from the boreal forests of her field site in Siberia. Flowing water was much harder to find and she spent days hiking in search of a stream to take her measurements. When she did eventually find one, adding the carefully measured mix of salts she uses to track how nutrients flow through the water, they slipped by so fast she couldn’t jog downstream quickly enough to take a second measurement.

“I was sitting in mud up to my elbows and just thinking ‘this can’t be happening.’ I totally freaked out,” Dr. Rodríguez-Cardona says.

Natalie Baillargeon

Polaris Years 2018, 2019

For Natalie Baillargeon, 2018 was full of new experiences— it was her first year in Polaris, her first summer research experience, her second ever plane ride, and her first time going camping. But it was not her last. Polaris sparked her passion for ecological research.he returned again in 2019, but to a very different Arctic.

Record-breaking heat, rolling thunder, and dry lightning storms—in Bethel, the heat literally shattered the thermometer.

“There were days where Polaris leaders had to call days short due to fieldwork being dangerous,”  Baillargeon says. “To be doing fieldwork in the Arctic and have to worry about heatstroke is not normal. It was sad and depressing.”

Ellen Bradley

Polaris Years 2019, 2020

Ellen Bradley’s drive to study climate science comes from her Indigenous background. She is Tlingit and was searching for research opportunities close to her homelands when she found Polaris. During the summer of 2019, she marveled at the heat and smoke of a record-breaking season, listened to the concerns of the local communities in Bethel, and played the informal role of an Indigenous educator among her fellow students. Her experience solidified her desire to not only conduct research but to add an Indigenous voice to it.

“My passion about all of this, climate research, climate communication, science communication, comes from my being Tlingit, from my Indigenous background, from my connection to the land, and knowing that the actions that have caused us to be where we are have come from colonization,” Bradley says. “If we are going to solve something like climate change, we are going to need the assistance of the Indigenous people who have lived in these places for, in many cases, over 20,000 years.”

Bradley based her project on the concerns she was hearing from community members around fishing, and used phytoplankton as a proxy for the health of aquatic ecosystems. She intended to return to carry on this research in 2020, but the pandemic postponed expedition plans. Instead, Bradley graduated from Gonzaga into a world altered by COVID-19

Searching for her next step, she got involved in the winter sports community and began skiing for outdoor advocacy groups. She is an athlete for NativesOutdoors, Protect our Winters, and Deuter, as well as a ski ambassador for Crystal Mountain, Washington.

“I know I want to keep skiing as part of my career, using skiing to tell stories about Indigenous people’s joy on the landscape and why outdoor recreation is important for our fight against climate change,” Bradley says.

She began work at Woodwell as a research assistant for the Arctic program in 2021 and she will return to Alaska in 2022 with the other 2020 Polaris students. When she looks towards the future of her career, Bradley says she wants to use the opportunities she’s had to represent Traditional Ecological Knowledge in the climate space.

“I’ve had a lot of privilege to go to school and I’m also really nerdy about science, so it just feels like the best way for me to use the tools I have,” Bradley says. “Incorporating my values into science is helpful to more than just myself and my passions. It’s a voice that has to be out there, or it won’t exist.”

Alma Hernandez

Polaris Year 2020

Alma Hernandez was accepted into the Polaris Project just before the world closed down due to COVID-19. In the uncertainty following lockdowns and rising cases, it became clear that the 2020 cohort wouldn’t be able to travel to the Arctic. Polaris, like everything that year, went virtual.

Though the field components of Polaris were postponed, Hernandez was still able to join Zoom meetings with other students and project mentors. She found the meetings just as meaningful, talking with others whose passions and backgrounds differed from her own, but converged around climate and the environment. Her interests lay in the unique Arctic soil that holds a wealth of information about our Earth’s changing climate.

“The composition of Arctic soils is really unique. They are extremely affected by global warming and have long-term implications as they release more greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change,” says Hernandez.

Since the completion of the program, Hernandez graduated from University of Texas, El Paso, and has been accepted to a Master’s program at the University of New Hampshire. She was also the recipient of the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship award and Woodwell’s own inaugural John Schade Memorial Fund award. Hernandez says she feels indebted to the mentorship she has received from Polaris.

“There were many instances when I felt overwhelmed by the thought of not having the qualifications to apply for graduate school or fellowships. I almost gave up, but Sue [Natali] and the Polaris Alumni were all so encouraging. My success in these applications wouldn’t have been possible without their support,” says Hernandez.