Page Content
Plenaries
Clyde Auditorium, SEC Armadillo
Sunday, 22 February 2026, 05:00 PM (GMT)
Dr. Britney Schmidt is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. She and her team develop robotic tools and instruments to study Earth’s poles and other planets. Exploring Earth’s ice shelves and glaciers and the oceans beneath them with their robot Icefin, Schmidt and her team help to capture the impacts of changing climate, while understanding analogs for Ocean Worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa. She has conducted nine field seasons in Antarctica and four in the Arctic. Her team has used Icefin to explore underneath the McMurdo, Ross, and Fimbul Ice Shelves and Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica and Wolstenholme Fjord, Greenland, working with NASA, NSF, Heising-Simons, Antarctica New Zealand, the British Antarctic Survey, and the Norwegian Polar Institute. A native of Tucson, AZ, she received a B.S. from the University of Arizona, and PhD from UCLA. Britney has a long history of NASA spacecraft involvement, including the Europa Clipper and Dawn missions and helped develop the Habitable Worlds Observatory, Europa Lander and Enceladus Orbilander concepts.
Clyde Auditorium, SEC Armadillo
Tuesday, 24 February 2026, 10:30 AM (GMT)
Prof. Eleanor Frajka-Williams is a Professor at the University of Hamburg, where she leads the Experimental Oceanography group. Her research investigates how ocean circulation-from submesoscale turbulence to the global overturning circulation-shapes and responds to Earth’s changing climate. Using sustained observations and process studies at sea, she explores ocean dynamics with tools such as autonomous underwater gliders to measure vertical velocities and turbulence, and mooring arrays to monitor the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and deep overflows. A particular focus of her work is how targeted observations can yield new physical insights and inform our understanding of large-scale climate variability. Originally from California, Frajka-Williams earned her PhD at the University of Washington and previously worked at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre and the University of Southampton before moving to Germany. She currently leads EPOC, Explaining and Predicting the Ocean Conveyor, an EU Horizon Europe project to reconceptualize the AMOC, and chairs the CLIVAR AMOC Task Team, which promotes international coordination across AMOC research communities.
Aditee Mitra
Clyde Auditorium, SEC Armadillo
Tuesday, 24 February 2026, 10:30 AM (GMT)
Dr Aditee Mitra is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in Cardiff University. Aditee has studied botany (BSc Hons.), ecosystems analysis and governance (MSc), and marine ecosystem dynamics (PhD), and researches the implications of environmental and climate stressors on marine plankton ecology. Together with various employments, these have provided skills to interface with a wide science base and undertake cutting edge research integrating state-of-the-art field, laboratory and system dynamics modelling methodologies. With a keen interest in the interface of science, governance and the public, Aditee has also worked as Managing Editor for the Journal of Plankton Research, Climate Change Research Consultant for the Welsh Local Government Association, Biodiversity Officer for Bridgend County Borough Council and a British Science Association Media Fellow with BBC Countryfile.
Over the last decade, Aditee has been a key driver of the new mixoplankton-centric paradigm in marine ecology that rewrites over 100 years of understanding of marine ecology. This led to an invitation to author a Scientific American entitled the Perfect Beast (March 2018), subsequently identified as one of ‘13 discoveries that could change everything' . A Sêr Cymru capacity-building award supported the establishment of a state-of-the-art mixoplankton research laboratory (MixoHUB) in Cardiff University. Aditee chairs the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) working group in mixoplankton, MixONET, and her contributions to the United Nations Global Compact’s Plankton Manifesto (2024) recognises mixoplankton as important drivers and lynchpins of marine ecology. The main thrust of Aditee’s interests now lay in taking these research findings into policy-setting and management arenas and also updating education in marine science through various projects as a member of the UKYA, under the auspices of the Royal Society.