Susan Adie - An environmentalist, educator and leader of several hundred expeditions to the Antarctic and Arctic (including 7 to the North Pole), Susan Adie has played a substantial role in managing the upsurge of tourism to the polar regions.  As Chair of the Field Operations Committee of the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, she developed, both for IAATO and the Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators, guidelines for safe and responsible polar tourism.  She also served for ten years as Expedition Operations Manager and Expedition Leader aboard the 130-passenger polar vessel, the G Expedition.  Adie Cove on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula is named in her honor.  She is President of the American Polar Society.

Caroline Alexander - is the author of the bestselling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition, and was the curator of the American Museum of Natural History's international blockbuster exhibition of  photographs that survived Shackleton's expedition. She was also the writer and producer of two award-winning documentaries based on her book, including the IMAX® Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure.

Elizabeth Cronin - Elizabeth Cronin oversees the Photography Collection in the Wallach Division. She is the curator of The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History. At NYPL, she curated Viewpoints: Latin America in Photographs and co-curated Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography. Cronin's background is interwar Austrian photography and she is the author of Heimat Photography in Austria. Cronin has an MA in German Studies from the Technical University of Dresden and an MA in Art History from the University of Minnesota. She received her PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Michele Devlin - Dr. Michele Devlin is Full Professor of Environmental Security at the US Army War College. She is a Doctor of Public Health, Registered Nurse, and Emergency Medical Technician. Her specialties and interest areas include disaster and emergency response; refugee relief; environmentally displaced migrants; climate change and human migration; civil-military relationships for humanitarian and emergency response; changing demographics due to climate change; remote area medicine; indigenous populations; and polar environmental security.

Kenn Harper- Kenn Harper lived in the Arctic for fifty years in Inuit communities in the Baffin region and in Qaanaaq, Greenland. He has worked as a teacher, development officer, historian, linguist, and businessman. He speaks Inuktitut, the Inuit language of the eastern Canadian Arctic, and has written extensively on northern history and language. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a recipient of Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee Medal. He lives in Ottawa.

Douglas W. Wamsley - Doug is a retired attorney by profession, and is an independent researcher and scholar who has written and lectured extensively on the history of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. Among other subjects, his publications examine individual contributions to our knowledge and perceptions of the far northern regions. He is the author of the biography, Polar Hayes, The Life and Contributions of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D., published by the American Philosophical Society, shortlisted for the 2010 William Mills Prize for non-fiction books sponsored by the Polar Libraries Colloquy. His latest books, Big Wolf, the Adventurous Life of Lieutenant Frederick G. Schwatka, U.S. Third Cavalry, and Dancing Chief, the Tragic Life of Lieutenant Frederick F. Kislingbury, examine the lives of these two intrepid soldier-explorers. Both are published by the American History Press.

Russell Potter - Internationally known for his books and lectures about the lost Franklin Arctic expedition of 1845, Russell Potter has been researching the history of the expedition and those who searched for it for more than 25 years. Among his books are Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture (2007), Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search (2016), and (as editor) May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth: Letters of the Lost Franklin Arctic Expedition (2022). He is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a member of the Arctic Institute of North America, and teaches at Rhode Island College in Providence, Rhode Island (USA).

William Muntean - Bill is a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He was a career Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Department of State from January 2001 to September 2023. His most recent assignment was as senior adviser for Antarctica, overseeing a range of political, economic, environmental, and scientific activities related to Antarctica from August 2018 to July 2023. In this position, he led the 2020 U.S. inspection of three Ross Sea stations, served as head of the U.S. delegation to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in 2022 (Berlin) and 2023 (Helsinki), and provided significant input into current U.S. government policy toward Antarctica (released in 2024). He regularly writes, lectures, and consults on Antarctic geopolitical topics and is a member of the board of the American Polar Society. His non-Antarctic diplomatic assignments included Luanda, Angola; London, United Kingdom; Panama City, Panama; Moscow, Russia; Managua, Nicaragua; and Washington, D.C. He received a BA in history from Washington University in 1994 and an MA in international affairs from George Washington University in 1997.

Sheldon Bart - The author of Race to the Top of the World: Richard Byrd and the First Flight to the North Pole, Sheldon Bart led expeditions conducting geological and geographical field research on Baffin Island in the Canadian Eastern Arctic and King George Island off the Antarctic Peninsula.  He has lectured at the National Archives, the Explorers Club, the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, the Adventurers Club of Los Angeles, the Virginia Historical Society, the Massachusetts History Society, and the Elisha Kent Kane Historical Society. 

Charles O. Cowing – Chas Cowing is Chairman of the Elisha Kent Kane Historical Society and Curator of the Kane-Peary-Byrd Room.  His biography of Elisha Kent Kane was published in The Encyclopedia of the Arctic (Nuttall, 2005). He has spoken on Polar Exploration before the Explorers’ Club, the American Polar Society and the Polar Libraries Colloquy at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State. In the year 2000 he co-founded Access Talent, a boutique voice-over talent agency in New York City. Chas is a member of the APS, the Glacier Society and Kane Lodge #454. To Chas, every year is Polar History Year!