Meet the Steering Group: Anna Crawford

I’m Anna Crawford and I joined the University of Stirling in September 2023 as a lecturer of physical geography in the Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences. I have served as a representative on the ScAN Steering Group since July 2025, shortly after Stirling joined the University of the Arctic.

My own research focuses on the life-cycle of an Arctic (and sometimes Antarctic) iceberg. I first travelled to the Arctic in 2011, where I joined the CCGS Amundsen, a Canadian research vessel, as a keen and green graduate student interested in the drift and deterioration of massive, tabular icebergs that we refer to as “ice islands”. While it has been a few years since my last visit to one of these ephemeral study subjects, I now utilise more remote-sensing technologies to monitor ice island decay during their transit of the Arctic Ocean, Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea. Another angle of my work, which initiated when I moved to Scotland in 2019, uses high-fidelity glacier models to study the calving, or birth, of icebergs and the influence of the calving process on glacier retreat. 

It is now a pleasure to serve as a link between ScAN, our burgeoning Stirling Arctic Research (StAR) Network, and the next UK Arctic Science Conference, which StAR will host in September 2027. We hope to welcome many of you there!