Announcement of SCAR and COMNAP 2014 Fellowship awards

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP) are pleased to announce this year’s Fellowship awardees.

The Fellowships for early career researchers are worth up to US$ 15,000 each and, this year, 25 applications were received with six Fellowships (four SCAR and two COMNAP) being awarded. The SCAR Fellowships are awarded to: Jaimie Cleeland (Australia), Camila Negrão Signori (Brazil), Fiona Shanhun (New Zealand) and Manoj M.C. (India). The COMNAP Fellowships are awarded to: Sandra Potter (Australia) and Keith Soal (South Africa).

The winners of the SCAR Fellowships will carry out a range of scientific research in areas including long-term mark–recapture data on albatrosses, microbial diversity in the Southern Ocean, CO2 flux in Antarctic Dry Valley soils and biomarker-based reconstruction of late Quaternary palaeoceanographic conditions. The COMNAP Fellowship recipients will carry out a project on topics of environmental policy and a technical project to understand ice loading on polar research vessels. Candidates come from a wide geographic spread of countries, and further detailed demographic information will be available on the SCAR website in the coming weeks.

SCAR has been offering scientific fellowships to early career scientists since 2005. Such fellowships have enabled Antarctic scientists to participate in a range of significant research including using ice cores to determine proxies for the Southern Annular Mode, a molecular study of Antarctic ostracods, and investigating particulate carbon and biogenic silica in sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Since 2005, 29 SCAR Fellowships have been awarded.

In 2011, COMNAP launched their Antarctic Research Fellowship Scheme, offering one fellowship for an early career person in order to carry out research within a COMNAP National Antarctic Program. With this year’s awards, there have been two COMNAP Fellowships awarded for a total of six awards since the scheme began.

Fellowships support the scientific goals of SCAR and the international cooperation goal of COMNAP, to develop and promote best practice in managing the support to Antarctic science. Fellowships enable early career researchers to join a project team from another country, opening up new opportunities and often creating research partnerships that last many years and over many Antarctic research seasons. Many of the projects’ results were presented at the recent SCAR Open Science Conference held in Auckland, New Zealand in late August 2014.

For more information about the scheme, please visit the Fellowships section.