Expedition Teams on board MS Fram

Steffen Biersack
From: Germany
Expedition Leader

Line Overgaard
From: Norway
Expedition Leader

German geologist, born and raised in Berlin, where he spent his "first life" with the Berlin Criminal investigation Department. Feeling the urge to change he resigned and went to university to study Geology. Before joining Hurtigruten, he has gained a long experience as a field trip guide in many European countries, Northern America and Southern Africa. In his opinion, geology and the complex "System Earth" is a most intriguing and important subject. So his particular aim is to convey this fascination of geology to a wider public. For this purpose he offers a wide range of lectures, dealing with our planet's phenomena.

Line started working for Hurtigruten in 2001 as a crew member. She worked on several ships on the spectacular Norwegian Coast before joining Fram in 2008. Line is Norwegian and grew up in the small settlement Klæbu outside Trondheim. She uses every chance she gets to travel. She has been backpacking in Asia, South America, Australia and Africa. Line enjoys outdoor activities like cross-country skiing, kayaking, snowboarding, hiking and her newest passion, climbing. Her favourite expeditions have been the 16-day ski expeditions over Spitsbergen`s snow-covered glaciers, the 8-day hike on the Arctic Circle Trail in Greenland, and kayaking on the rivers of Nepal. She completed the Arctic Nature Guide study program in 2010 in Spitsbergen.

Judith Heinreich
From: Germany
Expedition Coordinator

Bob Rowland
From: USA
Lecturer Biology / Ornithology

Originally from Potsdam, Germany, Judith has successfully managed to combine her personal interest in travel with working in the tourism industry. After completing her Master’s degree in Tourism Business Administration in Birmingham, UK, Judith worked in a hotel in Mauritius and then discovered Scandinavia as a tour guide. With the goal of improving her Spanish, she moved to Costa Rica, where she worked as an event manager in a 5-star hotel. During her two years there, she explored much of Central America. She then took a role with a local tour operator in Chile, moving to Pucón, a travel hotspot for outdoor adventure in the region. She topped off her South America experience with a three-month road trip through Chile, Bolivia and Peru, sleeping in an old Fiat, which managed to ascend 5,000 m above sea level while crossing the Andes. On her return to Germany, she became a Product Manager for a German tour operator, mainly planning expedition cruises to the Arctic and Antarctica. Recently relocated to Oslo, Judith is thrilled with her new role at Hurtigruten and is looking forward to sharing her enthusiasm with fellow travellers.

Growing up, Bob always wanted to be outdoors. He chose geology as it met that goal both academically and professionally. As an under-graduate, he started working on oceanographic expeditions, traversing the Pacific and Indian Oceans. While in the US Army, he spent two summers in Antarctica and two in Greenland, studying engineering properties of snow and sea ice. The fieldwork for his PhD was conducted along the coast of Alaska and offshore in the Northern Bering Sea. In his 20 years with the US Geological Survey, he has been involved in research projects that have taken him from Indonesia to the Ivory Coast, and have encompassed pollution studies, environmental impact surveys plus project management and the UN Law of the Sea. Since retiring, Bob has been circumnavigating the globe, taking on consulting jobs in Indonesia and New Zealand. For the last few years, Bob has been a consultant to the USGS on Law of the Sea issues.

Thess Appelberg
From: Sweden
Expedition Coordinator

Manuel Marin
From: USA
Lecturer Biology / Ornithology

Thess was born in Sweden, but early on her interest for languages led her to language and cultural studies abroad and she has many years of experience within the travel industry. In 2009, after 15 years in San Diego California, she came to Norway and was taken away by the extreme nature and wildlife, while travelling around the country and on board one of our ships. Since 2010 she has been working for Hurtigruten along the Norwegian coast, as a Tour Leader on board MS Kong Harald. She remains an avid traveler, and shares her enthusiasm for adventure and nature with all our guests.

Manuel Marin received his PhD in zoology and ornithology from Louisiana State University. He was formerly Curator and Director of Research of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in California, and is currently living in the countryside in central Chile, where doesa lot of ornithological research. As a researcher on neotropical birds, Manuel is one of the National Geographic Society Grantee. For over 30 years he has been travelling extensively through many countries on ornithological research and explorations, and he publishes regularly in many ornithological journals.. Manuel have been working for the Hurtigruten explorer department since its conception for well over a decade in both Artic and Antarctic regions.

Helga Kristiansen
From: Norway
Lecturer History

Klaus Kiesewetter
From: Germany
Lecturer History

Helga is educated a biologist and lives in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Longeyarbyen has been her home since 2013. She loves the outdoors and the wild and barren landscape of the Arctic Island. She was born in Telemark, Norway, a place rich with forests, and has always had a fascination for nature. She went to agriculture high school and knows how to use a chain saw and drive a tractor. Biology studies in Oslo brought her to Svalbard for the first time in 2011 where she fell in love the island. Here she has worked as a guide for hiking groups, snow mobile tours and city guiding before she became a manger for Camp Barentz. Helga got tired of environmental problems in the Arctic was not solved quickly enough so she ventured in to politics as a green politician and is at the moment elected in the local government in Longyearbyen. And she loves dogs.

Klaus is born in Germany but has lived most of his life in the Northern countries specially on the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Denmark . He studied Nordic history, language and literature in Reykjavik and Ålborg. He has translated some of the Islandic sagas to German. As freelancer-journalist he produced different tv-documentaries, travel information films and written numerous articlkes in magazines and newspapers about travel in Polar regions. For the last four years he has been living very close to the Baltic sea in Lithuania.

Rudolf Thomann
From: Chile
Lecturer Biology / Mammals

Tom Warmholts
From: The Netherlands
Activity / History

Born and raised in Chile, Rudolf studied biology in the city of Hamburg. Since 1990, back in Chile, he spent around 7 years in the desert in the north of the country, where he carried out scientific work with freshwater fishes of the high Andes lakes and rivers of the altiplano. He has always had a passion for fishes, and he ran a fish farm for about 7 years in the Lake District around Panguipulli. He has been teaching ecology and flora and fauna lessons at the university for more than 15 years. As an entuthiastic ecologist he was in charge for some time of the oldest Chilean environmental NGO. He visited Antarctica for the first time in 1994 and with Hurtigruten since 2002. The flame of the first visit is still awake.

Tom was born in the Netherlands and grew up in the country side where his love for nature began. He decided to study International Tourism in Paris to learn French. During his course and personal time, he worked in several countries to gain experience in the tourism industry and practice his language skills. He worked in China, Germany, France and England and traveled to many others on all 7 continents. After having been a guide in Iceland, his fascination for the polar regions arose. Greenland was his next destination where he first got in touch with Hurtigruten, while organizing a landing for the passengers. Soon after, he was offered an internship in Antarctica where he guided on several Expeditions on MS Fram.