Keynote speakers

Anne Ollila works as a Director of the Reindeer Herders Association, in Rovaniemi, Finland. She holds PhD in sociology and has studied future visions of young people in rural versus urban areas. She is a member of a reindeer herding family, owns reindeers herself, and practices real life reindeer herding work as much as possible. Read more.

 

Hilkka Vihinen works as a Research Professor in Natural Research Institute Finland (LUKE). She works with issues related to rural policy, agricultural policy, regional policy, EU-policies, rural communities, entrepreneurship and resilience and circulation economy. Her special competences are politics of agricultural policy, rural policy,regional policy and administration studies. Read more.

Inger Martinussen works as a Head of Department/Head of Research in Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research / NIBIO. Her expert areas are plant physiology/molecular biology, wild berries, herbs, antioxidants, breeding, plant secondary metabolites, metabolomics. Read more.

Lena Maria Nilsson works as a Senior Researcher and Research Coordinator at Arctic Research Centre at Umeå University. Her main research interests are food security, public health and temporal changes in Arctic lifestyle factors from a food security perspective and as triggers of low-grade inflammation and common uncommunicable diseases. Keywords: aboriginal food; nutrition; carbohydrate restriction; coffee; public Health; epidemiology; genetics; epigenetics; food security; indigenous people; climate change. Read more.

Margrét Geirsdóttir is a Project Manager at Matís – Icelandic Food and Biotech R&D. She has been working at Matis – previously Icelandic Fisheries Laboratories – from 1998 were her main research areas have been utilization of fish proteins from underutilized raw materials, extraction, functional properties, hydrolysation and bioactive properties. She works in the interface of research and industry, having experience of collaboration between research and spin-off enterprises in developing new products such as dairy products. Read more.

David Natcher is a Professor in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada). Dr. Natcher holds a Research Chair in Arctic Food Security and serves as the Canadian representative to the International Arctic Science Committee’s Social and Human Working Group and the Arctic Council’s Social, Economic and Cultural Expert Group (SECEG).

Uliana Vinokurova is a Director of the Centre of Circumpolar Civilisation and a Professor of the Arctic Academy of Science, Arctic State Institute of Art and Culture in Yakutsk, Russia. She holds PhD in sociology and psychology, and is an author of more than 400 publications. She is an author of the scientific discovery “The phenomenon of existence of the Arctic circumpolar civilisation”, revealing the bases of resilience in the Arctic, the specificities of polar cattle breeding, and mutual assistance as a universal law of relationships in natural environment.

Uliana grew up in a rural area and her father was the chairman of the collective farm. She has worked as a cattle-breeder in her younger years, so she knows agricultural work since her childhood. She has participated in the creation of several regional legal documents, concerning agricultural sector. She is one of the co-authors of the laws of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) "On the Protection and Use of the Gene Pool of the Yakut Cattle", "On Rural Education", "On the Nomadic Family", etc.

Recently, she has been actively involved in the preservation of sacred places, human resilience in conditions of global climate change and industrial development. Her particular research interests are the issues of Arctic pastoralism with the focus on local animal breeds and food practices in the cold climate.