Dr Nancy Bertler
BSc (Munich University); MSc (Quaternary Sciences) University of London; PhD (Geology), Victoria University of Wellington.
Nancy is an internationally respected research leader, whose work has influenced global understanding of climate history and climate change.
Nancy has been instrumental in the development of ice core research in New Zealand, and she currently leads the National Ice Core Research Programme and manages GNS Science’s New Zealand Ice Core Research Facility, renowned as one of the most advanced facilities of its kind in the world.
Her specialities include the recovery, analysis and interpretation of ice cores from coastal Antarctica with an emphasis to quantify Antarctica’s response to, and its ability to force, global climate change. She has led more than a dozen field campaigns in Antarctica and is the Chief Scientist of the 9-nation Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution (RICE) project, which focuses on the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in a warming world and its critical contribution to sea level rise.
Nancy’s driving force is to help communities understand the consequences of a warming world and to adapt, change, mitigate and build resilience to its effects. To this end, she undertakes extensive public, community and media engagement and is passionate about supporting and mentoring the next generation of scientists and researchers.
Nancy is the Director of the Antarctic Science Platform, a collaborative platform hosted by Antarctica New Zealand, which is mandated by the New Zealand Government to understand Antarctica’s impact on the global earth system and how this might change in a +2degC (Paris Agreement) world.
Internationally, she holds leadership roles within the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), including as the New Zealand’s Alternate Delegate. She has served as Chair for Antarctic Climate Projections for the 21 Century (AntClim21), is a member of the International Partnerships on Ice Coring Sciences (IPICS) and the International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) and she chairs the International Science Advisory Panel (ISAP) of Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF).
Nancy’s achievements have been acknowledged with a number of distinguished awards, including the 2019 Prime Minister’s Science Prize for her role in the ‘Melting Ice and Rising Seas’ team, which recognised her “transformative scientific discovery or achievement, which has had a significant economic, health, social, and/or environmental impact on New Zealand”.
