Expedition teams on board MS Spitsbergen

Tudor Morgan
From: Wales
Expedition Leader

Tessa Van Drie
From: The Netherlands
Expedition Leader

Tomas Zadrozny
From: Poland
Assistant Expedition Leader

Tudor has always had a passion for polar places. After many Arctic and Alpine expeditions while studying Geology at Manchester University he first went South with British Antarctic Survey wintered as a Field Guide before becoming became Field Operations Manager. After six years he moved on to work for the Antarctic Heritage Trust managing the operation at Port Lockroy and overseeing the conservation of other historic sites. Before joining the full time staff at Hurtigruten he was Operations Manager at IAATO. He has been awarded the Queens Polar Medal for outstanding service to Antarctic science and Heritage.

Tessa, from the Netherlands, finished her 1-year course as Arctic Nature Guide, hosted at Spitsbergen, Norway, in June 2011. She has her master degree in Physical Geography from the University in Utrecht. After working for four years in an office she decided to travel and do voluntary work for two years in Central- and South-America. She enjoyed traveling so much that she got a job as a tour leader for a Dutch company. For three years she guided Dutch groups through several countries in Central- and South-America. Now she is living in Norway and is really enjoying the outdoor life like cross country skiing, kayak paddling and hiking in the mountains. Since 2011 Tessa works as a lecturer on board FRAM, both in the Antarctica and the Arctic.

Tomasz obtained Master of Science degree and Engineering degree in Animal Science at the Agricultural University of Warsaw/Poland. He overwintered twice in Antarctica where he worked as biologist and base commander of the Polish Antarctic Station - Arctowski. From 1999, he works on board of Passengers Expedition Vessels. His favourite Earth’s “corners” are the areas around the Poles - the Polar Regions. There he shares with the guests his personal experience and presents lectures about wildlife of the Arctic and the Antarctic. One of his highlights has been the discovery of a previously unknown channel in Melchior Islands Archipelago on Feb. 2, 2003.

Steinar Aknes
From: Norway
Assistant Expedition Leader

Ina Schau Johansen
From: Norway
Expedition Coordinator

Cathrine Moen
From: Norway
Expedition Coordinator

Steinar grew up in the mountains of Norway, close to Bergen, and moved to Svalbard in 1996. For the firs 9 years he worked within tourism on different ships in the summer and on snowmobile in the winter seasons. He then moved on to work for the film industry, and mainly within natural history filmmaking. Steinar did field work for films like, BBC "Natures Great Events", BBC “Frozen Planet”, BBC Life and IMAX "To the Arctic". After this he had a five year period were he worked for The Norwegian Polar Institute as a logistical engineer, helping scientist with their fieldwork. Now, Steinar is taking on a new challenge as Assistant Expedition leader on Hurtigruten's Explorer voyages.

Ina has been a tour leader with Hurtigruten since 2000. Some of her best memories include Hurtigruten minute-by-minute , special interest cruises in Norway with MS Lofoten and all the beautiful nature she has seen around the world. Before she joined Hurtigruten, she worked as a lecturer on different cruise ships in Norway and as a staff member at Kandersteg International Scout Centre in Switzerland. She has a university degree in social work and she has also studied marketing management. In her spare time, Ina loves to go sailing and fishing.

Cathrine is born and raised in Bardu a place not far away from Tromsø in the Northern Norway. She has always had a passion for the polar areas. And have spent a lot of time in the Arctic – Greenland is an absolute favorite. She lived at Svalbard from 2011 to 2013. Cathrine is educated a teacher from the University in Tromsø, Arctic Nature Guide where she studied in Spitsbergen and she also holds a master of tourism from the Arctic University where she studied expedition tourism as a phenomenon. One of her passions is expeditions on skis and with pulkas. In 2013 she crossed Greenland on skis in the footsteps of Fridtjof Nansen and in 2016 she skied in the Northwest Passage from Cambridge Bay to Gjoa Haven in the historical footsteps of Roald Amundsen.

Friederike Bauer
From: Germany
Lecturer Geology / Geography / Glaciology

Bob Robert Rowland
From: USA
Lecturer Geology / Geography / Glaciology

Rudolf Thomann
From: Chile
Lecturer Activity / Biology / History

Friederike was born in southern Germany and grew up as the youngest of six children. Her brothers taught her how to play football, to swim, to survive … how much fun it can be to play while getting completely covered by mud – later she'll become a geologist. Rike studied in Darmstadt and Heidelberg, where she graduated and also performed her PhD on sedimentary rocks of northern Spain. Later on she focused on the evolution of the partly glaciated Rwenzori Mountains in the East African Rift System, and in 2013 she started at the University of Bergen working on Landscape East Africa and western Norway. In October 2015 she joined the Hurtigruten team to discover the world with likewise dedicated folks.

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.

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.

Olav Orheim
From: Norway
Lecturer Glaciology / Climatology

Tone Holte
From: Norway
Lecturer History

Klaus Kiesewetter
From: Germany
Lecturer History

As glaciologist and climatologist Olav has led numerous scientific expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctica. He was Managing Director of Norwegian Polar Institute 1993 to 2005 and administrated polar research at the Research Council of Norway from 2005 to 2012. Born in Bergen, he acquired his PhD in glaciologoy at Ohio State University studying the glacier history at Deception island. He worked for four decades at the Norwegian Polar Institute. In parallel he held a professorate in glaciology at the University of Bergen for nearly two decades. Olav was instrumental in the establishment of Norway’s permanent Antarctic station. He initiated the Norwegian Glacier Museum at Fjærland and the visitor center Polaria at Tromsø. He is presently the chairman of the board of the FRAM museum at Oslo and GRID-A in Arendal. Olav has received the Royal orders of St. Olav from Norway, and St. Charles from Monaco.

Tone is an actress and singer, doing performances concerning our ancient history and culture. Legends of the coast, real stories about ordinary people doing incredible things, songs that describe how it feels to live in this northern part of Europe... Just ask her, and she will give you a taste of the traditional Norwegian “soul”...She has studied Norwegian folklore at the University of Oslo. The tradition of folk songs is a topic she has been working on for several years, doing research, publishing books and CDs, and performing. The last 15 years, she has been working particularly with our Viking-history and the culture of the Vikings. Storytelling, performances, singing and reenactment on Viking-festivals and museums all over Norway has been an important part of her life the recent years. She has also toured Norwegian schools with several projects concerning this part of our history. Norwegian polar history is another great interest. Her fathers family comes from Tromsø, and were hunters and skippers in the Arctic. Her grandmother actually knew our polar hero Roald Amundsen!

Klaus Kiesewetter 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.

Sabine Barth
From: Germany
Lecturer History

Delphin Ruche
From: France
Lecturer History

Verena Meraldi
From: Mexico
Lecturer Biology

Sabine studied Theatre and film science, German, psychology and ethnology. She has worked as an editor for two literature and cultural magazines and is today today working as a freelance journalist. Her work focuses on culture, literature and travel, mainly in Iceland and Greenland. Sabine has written travel literature about both countries and her work has been published in different media, such as radio. For two years she was in charge of the Goethe-Centre in Reykjavik. Her topics are mainly culture, social development and the history of Iceland and Greenland.

As a wildlife biologist, Delphin has been using science as a passport to study and work around the world. This often brought him to mountainous and high-latitude regions, like Northern Canada where he completed his M.Sc., Antarctica where he overwintered at age 21, or the Ethiopian Highlands where he helped promote a national park. He stayed several years in the USA, teaching at UCLA and participating in various nature conservation projects throughout the country. Meanwhile, he setup and ran a consulting company specialized in radar ornithology. Every summer since 2011, Delphin studies seabirds in Svalbard for the Norwegian Polar Institute, but during the Arctic winter, he works as a northern lights guide in Northern Norway, where he now lives.

Verena is a Mexican-Swiss biologist from Mexico City, where she studied at the National University (UNAM) until 1998. In 2002, she received her PhD in Immunology from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and then worked for a year as a research assistant at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Her passion for travelling, hiking and observing wildlife has taken her to many places in Guatemala, Belize, Cuba, Scandinavia, Corsica and several other European destinations. She also took a six-month camping trip with her husband through Canada, the US and Mexico in 2003. Verena loves photography and has exhibited her landscape photographs several times in Switzerland. She has been working as a lecturer in Antarctica on board MS Fram since 2008 and currently lives in Switzerland with her husband and two young children.

Chris Croxson
From: USA
Lecturer Biology

John Chardine
From: Canada
Lecturer Biology

Dan Busby
From: Canada
Lecturer Biology / ornithology

Chris completed his Master’s degree in Marine Biology at the National Oceanography Centre (Southampton University in the UK), graduating with first-class honours. He is a very experienced cruise lecturer/guide on the marine fauna of the areas being visited, and associated ecosystems/oceanographic features. He has contributed to 120 voyages in the last 9 years around all 7 continents including a great deal of exposure to the Arctic and both the peninsula regions of Antarctica and the Ross Sea region. His talks seek to enhance expedition guests ’ enjoyment by creating a greater awareness and appreciation of the marine world that surrounds them.

John Chardine was born in Canada and grew up in England. His love for nature, photography and birds was developed at an early age. For the past 35 years John has focused his research work and teaching on seabirds and their ocean environment. The results of his studies have been published in numerous major international scientific journals. John is also an accomplished wildlife photographer and moderates a forum on the superb birdphotographers.net website. His photographs have appeared in books, magazines, journals, brochures and other publications, and he currently teaches field courses in wildlife photography techniques at home in New Brunswick, Canada. John has been a staff member aboard expedition cruise ships since 1992.

Dan was born and raised in small towns of the Canadian prairies and now lives in central Canada. He holds a M.Sc. in ornithology. During his 30 years as a wildlife biologist with Canada’s national government, he worked on a wide variety of research and conservation activities, including the effects of toxic chemicals on birds, population monitoring, avian diseases, environmental assessment, species at risk and the effect of wind power developments on birds. He now enjoys his longtime hobby of bird photography and is a frequent speaker on bird photography and bird conservation topics.

Andrea Felber
From: Germany
Lecturer

Bernard Lefauconnier
From: France
Lecturer Glaciology

Stian Aadland
From: Norway
Lecturer / kayaking / hiking

After school, Andrea worked in Gran Canaria for one year. Back in Germany, she studied language and cultural studies for Spanish and Russian in Bochum. Before graduating, she completed an internship on MS Fram in 2011/12. Thanks to this opportunity, she was convinced to become an interpreter and applied successfully for the University of Leipzig. For four years she studied interpretation for English, Spanish and Catalan. She also studied one semester at the University of Barcelona. Before she finished her master’s degree in 2016, she travelled in south and middle America (Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile) for three months.

Bernard was first assistant professor in Economics at the University of Caen, France. While he was director of an Alpine centre in Savoie, France, for three years, his interest progressed from sport activities to the environment. Bernard started new university studies at the University of Grenoble and became a glaciologist, specialist on Arctic glaciers and the link between glaciers and climate. After his Ph.D. he has worked as a researcher with the Norwegian Polar Institute in Oslo and the Laboratory of Glaciology in Grenoble. As a director of Research, he has initiated three European projects in the Arctic and has been French representative at the International Arctic Scientific Committee - IASC. Bernard has also been professor at the University of Silesia in Poland. For 25 years he has led a number of national and international field scientific campaigns, mainly in Svalbard, but he has also participated to expeditions in Greenland, Baffin Land and Franz Joseph Land. He established a new French Arctic station in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Today, Bernard is writing pedagogic booklets and gives lectures to public of all ages.

Stian has been an adventurer since the age of two, when he first tried flying. His first love was an old snowboard that he used all his savings to buy. Stian’s love for snowboarding grew very fast and ended up taking him all over the world in search of the perfect snow. At 31, he finally found his snowboarding paradise…in the faraway mountains of Svalbard, where he spends all his time during winter. Stian plans to live in Longyearbyen for the next 29 years, after which he intends to retire to Hawaii. Stian lives for adventure. He is also educated as an Arctic Nature Guide from the University of Svalbard. He works full-time as an expedition guide in the mountains of Svalbard in the High Arctic and also with the penguins in Antarctica. When he is not onboard MS Fram, he leads snowmobile trips, long ski expeditions and mountain skiing trips to the high mountains all over Svalbard. If you have any questions about hiking, glacier walks or other activities, feel free to ask him.

Thomas Grant Olsen
From: Norway
Kayak guide

Andreas Anderson
From: Norway
Photographer

Karsten Bidstrup
From: Denmark
Photographer

Thomas was a plumber in Stavanger but always liked to be in the Nature. So he wanted to do something else for a year and moved to the Northern part of Norway to study, this year has turned into several years with studying Sports, Friluftsliv and Arctic Nature Guide at university first, and then worked for several years as a guide on Svalbard.Dogsleding, kayaking, skiing and glaciers is what he enjoys the most to guide in the north. His hobby is kajakkpolo and he lives in Longyearbyen with his closest family the husky R2-D2.

Andreas was born and raised in Stavanger, Norway. He got his first proper camera in 2005. One year later he started working in a photostore, where he is still working today. In his spare time, he spends as much time as possible on own photo projects or photo assignments ranging from local weddings to editorial for international companies. Andreas has a bachelordegree in biology and has a huge interests in everything that moves, either on land or at sea. He loves to travel and to experience new cultures and sceneries, and wherever he goes, he brings his camera. Exploring the coast of Norway, the coast of Africa or the open ocean, he is always fascinated by either the emptiness or the richness of a place.

Karsten has been working as a professional photographer for 18 years and spent the past years as a staff photographer for the biggest Danish travel magazine Vagabond, contributing to articles from all over the world. He is also a writer with the biggest digital camera magazine in Scandinavia. Karsten is author of the book "Et andet Afrika" (about travelling in Africa). He has been on MS Fram many times and says that one of his biggest travel experiences so far was to stand on the deck of MS Fram, watching the sun rise over the remote mountains in Antarctica.

Brooke Green
From: USA
Kayak guide

Benedicte Ingstad
From: Norway
Guest Lecturer

Brooke Green grew up in Georgia, where she spent most of her time playing sports. After graduating from the University of Georgia and working in the business world, she decided working in an office wasn’t for her. She attended an outdoor instructor training program in the UK and earned the BCU 3 Star Sea Kayak and Level I Coaching Award. Brooke loves going on big adventures and spent 3 months paddling the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska and 2 months biking from the Canadian border to Mexico. She has been sea kayak guiding for the past 6 years in parts of Alaska, Washington, and a season in Patagonia.

Benedicte Ingstad, is Professor emerita in Medical Anthropology, University of Oslo. She did Fieldwork/research in Qasigiannguit Greenland for 8 months 1969 and in various African and Asian countries from 1983 to 2011. Daughter of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, she waas with Helge when the Norse/Viking ruins at L`ance aux Meadows were discovered in 1960. She participated in excavations at the site in 1961 and 1963. She has written a biography of her parents, "A Grand Adventure", published at McGill University Press in May 2017. Now retired, she is a widow with four children and five grandchildren.