Lawson W. Brigham is Distinguished Professor of Geography & Arctic Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and was chair of the Arctic Council’s Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment (2005– 9). Previously, Captain Brigham was a career US Coast Guard officer who commanded four ships, including the polar icebreaker Polar Sea, navigating in 1994 to the extreme ends of the global ocean. He has been a research fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a Coast Guard Academy and Naval Postgraduate School faculty member, and Alaska director of the US Arctic Research Commission. He is a graduate of the Coast Guard Academy and the Naval War College, and holds graduate degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (MS) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil & PhD). His research has focused on the Russian maritime Arctic, Arctic climate change, marine transportation futures, and polar geopolitics.