ARCUS Student Award | Letter from the Executive Director

Dear Colleague,

I am writing to let you know that the ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence competition will be on hiatus this year. The ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence is a student paper competition judged in four broad categories: Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Interdisciplinary Research, with up to four awards given each year. The competition, sponsored and operated by ARCUS on behalf of its member institutions, began in 1996, with the first winners recognized at the 1997 Arctic Forum and ARCUS annual meeting in Washington DC. For further information, see http://www.arcus.org/award/index.html

In recent years the submissions to the competition have increased dramatically and the program has outgrown ARCUS' ability to operate it solely with ARCUS member dues. The ARCUS Board of Directors decided to suspend the 2004-2005 competition in order to further develop the program and to seek additional grant funding and sponsorship to sustain the ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence on a long term basis.

In an effort to continue to support and highlight the work of young arctic researchers during this hiatus, ARCUS partnered this year with the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) Open Science Meeting (OSM) sponsoring agencies and the meeting organizers to hold a student poster competition at the 27-30 October 2003 conference in Seattle, Washington.

The SEARCH OSM was an international, interdisciplinary, and multi-agency endeavor with a very broad representation of students, countries, disciplines, and research. Student participation in the SEARCH OSM was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, the Alaska Native Science Commission, and ARCUS.

The student posters submitted to the meeting were judged by the meeting organizing committee, which was a representative multi-agency and multi-disciplinary group. ARCUS partnered with the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA) to offer awards to the competition winners. The winners will receive support to attend a relevant conference on the Arctic and their work will be highlighted at the 2004 Arctic Forum in Washington DC. They also will receive a two-year Arctic Institute of North America membership, which includes a subscription to the interdisciplinary journal ARCTIC. Information about the student posters presented at the SEARCH meeting is available at http://www.arcus.org/SEARCH/meetings/2003/studentposters.php .

We would like to thank all of the ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence competition participants over the past seven years for their submissions, which reflect the excellence of researchers working in the Arctic and the diversity of their research. We also want to thank the many arctic researchers who have served as competition judges; your contribution to the development of these young investigators has been significant and we would like to acknowledge the many hours of service and the dedication and commitment that have been the hallmark of the judges over the years.

We encourage you to spread the word about the year-long hiatus of the ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence competition. We expect to return with an even better program in the fall of 2004. More information about the SEARCH OSM and about the ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence can be found by visiting the ARCUS web site at: http://www.arcus.org .

Wendy K. Warnick
Executive Director, ARCUS