Arctic Leadership Initiative

Early Career Faculty Opportunities

The University of Alaska has awarded 13 Early Career Faculty (ECF) Fellowships to support the Arctic Leadership Initiative (ALI). 

In addition to augmenting UA’s research capacity, these awardees are part of a leadership team drawn from all three UA universities and across the state to implement ALI. ECF Fellows work closely with faculty mentors, external partners, and student teams to solve problems and advance opportunities in the Arctic.

2026-2028 ECF Fellows

Four new Early Career Faculty Fellows have been selected for two-year appointments beginning Summer 2026. Their work expands ALI's research footprint across family resilience, international polar partnership, Arctic economic research, and Alaska's seasonal workforce.

Mariah Seater (UAF) LinkedIn

Dr. Mariah Seater's research examines how climate change shapes the health and resilience of Arctic families. Her work intersects public health, family systems, and the lived experience of climate disruption across rural and Indigenous Alaska communities.

Seoyeon Kim (UAF) LinkedIn

Dr. Seoyeon Kim studies how Arctic amplification drives Alaska wildfire risk through increased lightning. She uses global climate models and high-resolution regional downscaling to isolate how sea ice loss and warming sea surface temperatures precondition extreme convective weather events.

Amy Cross (UAA) LinkedIn

Dr. Amy Cross focuses on Arctic economic research and community-engaged undergraduate scholarship. Her appointment integrates economic analysis with hands-on student research opportunities, building Alaska's pipeline of Arctic-fluent economists and policy analysts.

Xiaofei Song (UAS) LinkedIn

Dr. Xiaofei Song's research addresses career decision-making among Alaska's seasonal workforce, examining how workers in fisheries, tourism, and other cyclical industries navigate long-term career paths in a state defined by economic seasonality.

2025-2027 Cohort (Year 2)

Anna is a new faculty member at the Water and Environmental Research Center at UAF. Originally from a small Italian mountain village, she earned her PhD from ETH Zurich, studying sediment dynamics in a glacierized Alpine catchment. Her doctoral work revealed the strong link between climate, erosion, and sediment transport. Before UAF, she was a researcher at ETH Zurich, developing hydrological models in Nepal, Africa, and Southeast Asia, focusing on extreme climate events. She first connected with Alaska in 2019 during a research assignment at the Alaska Climate Research Center, a period during which she and her family fell in love with the state and aspired to return.

Her research focuses on the complex interplay between climate, water, and sediment fluxes in river systems. Ongoing changes in Alaska—including intense precipitation, permafrost thaw, and glacier melt—suggest increased erosion and river sediment loads. Similar trends have been observed in other cold regions, with potential significant impacts on ecosystems, fish habitats, and infrastructure. By integrating field data, remote sensing, and advanced modeling, Anna aims to develop predictive models of hydrology and sediment transport in rapidly changing Arctic and sub-Arctic rivers.

She is dedicated to mentoring and supporting students through advising graduate students, teaching graduate-level courses, and leading workshops and other educational activities.

More about Anna Costa
I am a postdoctoral research fellow working at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I joined UAF as a graduate student in the sea ice research group in 2019 and earned my Ph.D. in Geophysics with a concentration in snow, ice, and permafrost geophysics in 2025. My doctoral research focused on better understanding sea ice deformation at scales of meters to kilometers using combined radar remote sensing and field observations. During this work, I was fortunate to participate in fieldwork at drifting camps on the Beaufort Sea, as well as in the Alaskan communities of Utqiaġvik and Nome.

My current research builds on this doctoral work, aiming to continue to better understand sea ice deformation at intermediate spatial scales. I am particularly interested in landfast sea ice, the area of stationary ice contiguous with the coastline that is integral to wintertime subsistence activities and travel in many Arctic coastal communities.
Dr. Colin Maher is a researcher at the Environment and Natural Resources Institute at the University of Alaska Anchorage and an ORISE Fellow through the USDA Forest Service. Colin’s general research interests are understanding the ecology of trees and forests in boreal and mountain environments, including arctic and alpine treelines—the northern and elevational limits of trees. In his previous position as a postdoctoral researcher at UAA, Colin helped initiate a field-based study of treelines at 19 remote sites across Alaska’s Brooks Range. One outcome of this research was the discovery of a link between treeline advance and tree-ring growth with the decline of autumn sea ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. His current research seeks to disentangle this link by testing competing hypotheses of what could cause it: 1) decreased sea ice could lead to more local-source precipitation as snow, which insulates soils in winter. This benefits soil microbes, which in turn can increase soil nutrient availability and increase tree growth. 2) More simply, increases in temperature may be affecting sea ice and tree-rings separately but in ways that result in similar trends.
 
  • Anna Costa (UAF), who studies the interplay between climate, erosion, and sediment fluxes in rapidly changing Arctic river systems. LinkedIn
  • Emily Fedders (UAF), studying sea ice deformation at scales of meters to kilometers using combined radar remote sensing and field observations. LinkedIn
  • Colin T. Maher (UAA), focusing on the ecology of trees and forests in boreal and mountain environments, including Arctic and alpine treelines, the northern and elevational limits of trees. LinkedIn

Amy D. Holt (UAS) was an ECF Fellow in 2025-26.

Founding Fellows, 2024-2026

ALI gratefully acknowledges its founding ECF Fellows, whose two-year work has helped establish ALI as a functioning, system-wide platform.

Megan Behnke was born and raised here in Lingít Aaní. She first joined UAS as a stream chemistry technician in 2016 with the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center, and returned in 2022 to serve as postdoctoral fellow through the Coastal Rainforest Margins Research Network and the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center. In between she received her MS and PhD from Florida State University, studying what happens when warming temperatures release organic carbon that has been locked away in permafrost, glaciers, and wetland soils in both coastal temperate rainforests and around the pan-Arctic with the Arctic Great Rivers Observatory. Megan uses a combination of ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry and elemental and isotopic ratios to explore how the sources, processing, and fates of organic matter are changing due to climate change and associated shifts in land use and land cover.

Megan's current research interests include understanding how cryospheric warming (i.e. glacial melt and permafrost thaw) is changing the type and delivery of organic matter to streams and to the nearshore environment and the role human actions (such as fossil fuel burning) have on organic matter cycling. She is also interested in understanding the role of trees in delivering dissolved organic matter to forest floors, stream systems, and the nearshore environment. In addition to research, Megan spends her time paddling, skiing, climbing, gardening, reading (particularly science fiction) and bushwhacking around the forest trying to find her dog.

Learn more about Megan Behnke

Memphis is a postdoctoral fellow at UAA researching sustainable biomining of critical minerals. Her work aims to characterize microbial interactions with rare earth elements and harness these interactions to develop more environmentally friendly methods for rare earth element extraction and separation. Her previous work spanned topics on the nitrogen cycle, trace metal biogeochemistry, microbial ecology, water and soil quality, and human impacts on the environment. Prior to graduate school, she spent 3 years as a research technician and lab manager in the Bone Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapies Division at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

I am a new postdoc at the International Arctic Research center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Currently, I am funded through the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim Sustainable Salmon Initiative. Environmental DNA (eDNA) is genetic material shed by organisms in their natural environment. It is possible to use eDNA to detect species of interest in ecosystems. I use environmental DNA techniques to both (1) study the declining salmon runs that have caused severe hardship in subsistence communities within the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim (AYK) region and (2) quantify clam abundance that has been a hardship to the intertribal Chugach Regional Resources Commission and scientists at the Alutiiq Pride Marine Research Institute. I will use a previously published quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay to detect salmon. I plan to develop an assay for clam eRNA.

The detection of eDNA, using qPCR, needs to be statistically validated. I will fit statistical models to predict daily salmon passage using eDNA concentrations. The outcomes of the research aim to inform tribal members of salmon abundance in the Kuskokwim River Basin. For quantification of eRNA, experiments will be run at the Alutiiq Pride Marine Research Institute to quantify and differentiate between larvae, juveniles and adults.

More about Brandi Kamermans

Dr. Rick Lader is a Research Associate with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He earned his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from UAF in 2018, focusing on the emergence of rapidly changing climate extremes in Alaska. Dr. Lader’s research agenda involves the development of high-resolution datasets for Alaska, suitable for the analysis of historical and projected climate states. He has served as lead author on seven peer-reviewed publications on topics related to Alaska’s climate and he has contributed to high-profile assessments, like NOAA’s Arctic Report Card. Dr. Lader is actively leading projects involved with heat and wildland fire extremes, and climate resilience in Alaska.

Learn more about Rick Lader

Eduard Zdor, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. His work centers on the linguistic dimensions of archaeological collection development, with a particular emphasis on integrating Indigenous perspectives into museum databases and interpretive frameworks. For over two decades, Dr. Zdor has actively participated in collaborative Alaska–Chukotka research initiatives, serving as both partner and Principal Investigator in projects focused on Traditional Ecological Knowledge and subsistence practices. In addition to his scholarly contributions, Dr. Zdor has long represented marine hunting communities in regional and international forums. He is a committed advocate for the recognition and application of shared Indigenous knowledge systems, emphasizing their value in environmental observation, cultural continuity, and cross-cultural dialogue.
  • Megan Behnke (UAS), researching the effect of glacial melt and permafrost on streams and nearshore environments. Megan continues with ALI as a Research Affiliate and ECF Advisor. LinkedIn
  • Memphis Hill (UAA), studying sustainable critical mineral extraction methods in the Arctic. LinkedIn
  • Brandi Kamermans (UAF), studying salmon assessment based on DNA shed. LinkedIn
  • Rick Lader (UAF/IARC), who studies extreme climate events in the Arctic related to wildland fire. LinkedIn
  • Eduard Zdor (UAF), who conducts circumpolar research about protecting traditional subsistence rights. LinkedIn

One of the Board of Regents’ strategic priorities, the Arctic Leadership Initiative (ALI) positions Alaskans as world leaders in the Arctic, giving students and early career professionals the foundation and network needed to lead in the changing Arctic, and enhancing the reputation of UA’s universities as centers of Arctic expertise.

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