People
PEOPLE
Skálanes is operated by a small core team supported by a wider network of collaborators, visiting researchers and long-standing academic partners. The daily operation of the field station depends on a small staff responsible for maintaining the reserve, supporting visiting groups and managing the practical logistics of fieldwork. Their work ranges from habitat management and infrastructure maintenance to guiding research groups through the practical realities of working in a remote field environment.
Skálanes also benefits from a broad network of visiting faculty, researchers and long-term academic collaborators. Over the years, university groups from a range of institutions have conducted field courses, student research projects and collaborative studies at the site. These relationships form an important part of the station’s development, allowing research themes and datasets to grow gradually through repeated visits and long-term engagement with the landscape.
Scientific Advisory Board
Patrick Heidkamp, Ph.D.
Professor of Geography, Southern Connecticut State University
Dr. Heidkamp has been bringing students to Skálanes as part of an annual summer study abroad trip to Iceland, since 2011. His primary research interest focuses on transdisciplinary engagement with the blue economy and just sustainability transitions in the coastal zone. In addition to his primary appointment as a Professor in the Department of the Environment, Geography and Marine Sciences at Southern Connecticut State University, he is an affiliated faculty member of the University Centre of the Westfjords in Iceland, and a founding member of the UArctic Thematic Network on the Blue Economy and the Arctic (TN BlueArctic).
Timothy Lane, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, Liverpool John Moores University
Dr Lane has been coming to Skálanes since 2016, bringing students on the LJMU BSc Geography and BSc Climate Change Programmes. His research focuses on environmental and glacier reconstruction across the Arctic and sub-Arctic, based on geomorphological mapping, surface exposure dating, and lake coring. He has conducted fieldwork in Greenland, Norway, USA, and Iceland.
Affiliated Researchers
Rannveig Þórhallsdóttir, archaeologist, MA, Teacher at the High School of Egilsstaðir. Rannveig is also currently working on her PhD at the University of Iceland. She works part time as a field archaeologist.
Rannveig is the head of archaeology research at Skálanes. Rannveig is fascinated with the settlement period of Iceland. She is currently doing her post-graduate research at the University of Iceland, „Millennium by the Atlantic Ocean” on The Skálanes farm mound. In that research Rannveig is looking at a millennium of living conditions by researching the aDNA of bacteria, plants and animals found there. She was a volunteer at the rescue excavation of “The Mountain Woman” in 2004 and worked from 2016-2019 at the Viking Age site in Stöð in Stöðvarfjörður. Rannveig started her own company Sagnabrunnur in 2008 and does contractual archaeological registration through that. In the recent years Rannveig has been working with Ragnheiður Traustadóttir at Antikva, especially on the research of Fjordur (2020-2022), where 4 pagan graves were found from around 1000 AD.
2.
Charlie Peck, Ph.D.
Professor, Computer Science, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, US
Co-leader of Earlham’s Icelandic Field Studies program with Dr. Emmett Smith
Charlie is an applied computer scientist, working with biologists, archaeologists, ecologists, and other ologists to apply technology to their research projects. Our group at Earlham designs and builds low-cost near-earth survey equipment based on UAVs, tools for sampling and extracting modern and ancient DNA from the environment, and software workflows for analyzing a wide variety of genetic and image data. Charlie started bringing groups of students to Skalanes in 2013 and since then has developed a series of collaborations with Oli, Rannveig, and the other scientists working at Skalanes. Given his druthers he would move to Seydisfjordur and join the local search and rescue crew.
https://fieldscience.cs.earlham.edu/https://cluster.earlham.edu/~charliep/
https://earlham.edu/faculty-staff/charlie-peck/