Rate My Professor Nancy Bertler

Professor Nancy Bertler holds a full professorship at the Antarctic Research Centre within the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She maintains a joint appointment with GNS Science, Earth Sciences New Zealand, where she serves as Principal Scientist and leads the National Ice Core Research Facility. Bertler obtained her BSc in geology and geography from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1996, an MSc in Quaternary Sciences from Royal Holloway, University of London in 1999, and a PhD in Geology from Victoria University of Wellington in 2004 under the supervision of Professor Peter Barrett. Her career includes over 13 scientific expeditions to Antarctica, totaling more than 30 months of fieldwork, and she has been instrumental in establishing New Zealand's ice core research infrastructure, including an intermediate-depth ice core drilling system. From 2018 to 2025, she directed the Antarctic Science Platform, fostering national and international collaborations on Antarctic environmental research.

Bertler's research focuses on paleoclimatology, utilizing ice cores from coastal Antarctic regions to reconstruct past climate variability, sea ice dynamics, and ice sheet responses, particularly in the Ross Sea sector. As Chief Scientist, she led the multinational Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution (RICE) project, which produced an 83,000-year ice core record published in 2020 in Climate of the Past. Other significant publications include 'Sensitivity of Holocene East Antarctic productivity to subdecadal variability set by sea ice' (2021, Nature Geoscience), 'Antarctic evidence for an abrupt northward shift of the Southern Hemisphere westerlies at 32 ka BP' (2023, Nature Communications), and 'Aeolian dust and diatoms at Roosevelt Island (Ross Sea, Antarctica) over the last 2 millennia' (2025, Climate of the Past). She has authored or co-authored 39 peer-reviewed publications and contributed to international efforts like the International TransAntarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE). Bertler received the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2011 and the Blake Leader Award from the Sir Peter Blake Trust in 2016 for her leadership in climate research and environmental advocacy. Her work has advanced global understanding of Antarctic climate history and its implications for future sea-level rise and climate modeling.