Meet the Scientist

Expedition 2: Falkland Islands (2016)

Kit Hamley grew up in Bozeman, Montana, loving everything outdoors. She attended the Chewonki Semester School in Maine her junior year of high school, where she fell in love with Maine. She completed her undergraduate degree in Geology at Bowdoin College in 2010. After graduating, she traveled to South America for a few months to work on an organic farm and visit archaeological sites. She returned to Maine to lead kayaking trips in the summers for Chewonki. She also worked at Coastal Studies for Girls, a science and leadership semester school for sophomore girls in high school out of Freeport, Maine. In 2012 she returned to Bowdoin to work as a research assistant on two projects for the Earth and Oceanographic Science department, researching nutrient transport in Maine’s watersheds and climate records from arctic peat cores. She is now a master’s student at The University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, where she is studying an extinct species of fox from the Falkland Islands. She is combining paleoecology and archaeology to figure out if there were pre-European humans in the Falkland Islands and whether or not they may have brought the fox to Falklands, thereby altering the ecology of the islands, which are home to many species of penguin and other ground nesting birds.