Iceland Adventure Part 2: Teaching

 By Richard B. Primack

“How to live – How to get the most life as if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it.” Henry David Thoreau in his Journal.

From May 27-31 this year, I was a Visiting Professor at the University of Iceland teaching a short course in conservation biology for 14 students, a mix of Master’s students and recent grads now working for government conservation agencies. About half were Icelandic and the other half from elsewhere in the world.  

Mornings consisted of short lectures, student presentations, short guest lectures by leading Icelandic conservation biologists, and conversations about papers from the current literature. Students also attended a PhD defense on the population biology of shorebirds in Iceland.

Here are four of the guest lecturers:

Photo 1: Ingibjörg Svala Jónsdóttir carries out long term research on how climate change affects the Icelandic tundra.

Photo 2: Jose Alves described an international effort to investigate and protect migratory shorebirds.

 

Photo 3: Snæbjörn Pálsson investigates the conservation genetics and evolution of animals in Iceland. 

 

Photo 4: Brynhildur Davíðsdóttir assesses the value of Iceland’s nature and landscape. 

As I will describe in the next post, we also went on afternoon field trips.