Cardia Simões Jefferson

Cardia Simões obtained his PhD in 1990 from Cambridge University (UK). He is a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, and an adjunct professor at the Climate Change Institute, University of Maine (USA). A member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, he is a past vice-president of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR/ISC), and a past vice-provost for research at UFRGS. A leading Latin American polar scientist, he introduced glaciology to Brazil, and created the Polar and Climatic Centre at UFRGS, an institution that leads research on snow and ice in this country. Presently, he is the general coordinator of the virtual Brazilian National Institute for Cryospheric Sciences. He is a recipient of the Brazilian National Order of Scientific Merit. A polar explorer, he led several international scientific expeditions to the Antarctic ice sheet, including one that established the southernmost Latin American scientific laboratory on the planet, the Criosfera 1 module (84°S, 79.5°W). He has mainly published on the paleoenvironmental ice-core record and changes in subpolar and tropical ice masses.