Dr. Petty is a sea ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland. He is a British citizen, but moved to the US in January of 2014. Alek completed his Masters in Physics at Bristol University in 2010, and his PhD in Climate Science at University College London in 2014. He uses satellite and airborne sea ice observations, together with climate model simulations and a variety of data analysis tools, to better understand Arctic and Antarctic sea ice variability and their impacts on the global climate system. A new research focus for Alek has been sea ice forecasting, including seasonal predictions of the summer Arctic and Alaskan sea ice conditions. His work has been featured in several NASA features on Arctic sea ice. He was selected as an International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) Early Career Fellow in 2016 and is organizing a discussion group at the upcoming POLAR2018 workshop in Davos, Switzerland on the impact of extreme events in the Arctic. Alek has been lucky enough to visit the polar regions on several occasions, including two research expeditions around the Beaufort Gyre, north of Alaska, and two NASA airborne campaigns over Greenland and Antarctica. He mainly spent this time pointing and taking photographs. In his spare time, Alek likes to watch and play football (the British kind), listen to music and, more recently, struggle to catch fish in the rivers of Virginia. Learn more about Alek's research activities here, or follow him on Twitter!. Skaggs Fellow - October 2017. Alek's activities in Sitka

• Raven Radio Morning interview
• Natural History Seminar at UAS - “Rapid declines in Arctic sea ice cover: what does this mean for Alaska?”
• Blatchley Middle School - "Using satellite data to model sea ice and predict future scenarios"
• Sitka High School and Mount Edgecumbe High School "Satellite technology"