Arctic Chairs

Evan T. Bloom is a lawyer and former senior U.S. diplomat. At the U.S. Department of State he served as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and Fisheries and Director of the Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs and was a member of the Senior Executive Service.

In addition to serving as Polar Governance Chair of the Ted Stevens Center he is senior advisor to the Centre for the Ocean and the Arctic of the Arctic University of Norway, global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, Marine Protected Area Advisor to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies of the University of Tasmania. He is co-editor of the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Polar Law (2025).

Bloom helped establish the Arctic Council, negotiating its initial rules and documents in 1996. He supervised U.S. representation in the Council from 2006 to 2020. He co-chaired the Council’s task force that produced the eight-party Agreement on Arctic Science Cooperation in 2017. He also co-chaired the Council’s Ecosystem-Based Management Experts Group.

He led U.S. Antarctic policy as head of the U.S. delegations to the annual Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings and the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources from 2006 to 2020. He led four official inspections of foreign facilities in Antarctica.

He led the U.S. delegation to high seas treaty negotiations (biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction) at the UN from 2016-2020. He chaired the Executive Committee of the federal Extended Continental Shelf Task Force and supervised State Department representation at the International Maritime Organization and the International Seabed Authority. He led U.S. delegations to numerous law of the sea bilateral and multilateral dialogues and served as the State Department’s representative to the White House Ocean Policy Committee.

Mr. Bloom is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Explorers Club. He received the Commandant’s Distinguished Public Service Medal from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2020 and the U.S. Antarctica Service Medal in 2007. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and juris doctor from Columbia Law School.

Dr. Paal Sigurd Hilde is professor of war studies at the Institute for Defence Studies (IFS), which is part of the Norwegian Defence University College. He earned his DPhil in politics at the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s) in 2003. He is primarily an academic and enjoys teaching and supervising, which he does mostly for the master’s programme at the Norwegian Command and Staff College. His main research interests include Norwegian security and defence, NATO and Arctic security issues.

In other roles Paal worked on policy planning at the Norwegian Ministry of Defence from 2004 until he joined IFS in 2008. From November 2021 to July 2022 he was back at the Ministry to work on the 2022 NATO Summit. Paal has also worked for two government-appointed commissions: From August 2006 to November 2007 for the Defence Policy Commission, and from January 2015 to June 2016 he led the secretariat of the Norwegian Commission on Afghanistan.
Paal served 15 years (1998-2013) parttime in the Norwegian Home Guard, including six years as a team leader in a ranger unit, and five years (2018-2023) as a parttime specialist in the J5 branch at the Norwegian Joint Operational Headquarters.

CDR Stefan Lundqvist serves as military lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University (SEDU) since 2010. He is an active-duty officer holding a Ph.D. degree in Political Science from Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Until his marked turn towards academia, CDR Lundqvist served in various sea- and shore-based positions at tactical and operational levels of command. His research interests include geopolitics, geo-economy, military strategy and security cooperation in the Arctic and Baltic Sea regions, as well as pedagogy. CDR Lundqvist is Pro-Dean at SEDU – i.e. Vice-chair of its Research and Education Board, Chairing its Syllabus Committee. CDR Lundqvist is the Sweden Chair to the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies, Anchorage, U.S.

His research has appeared in scholarly books and journals including Studies in European Affairs, Defence Studies and the RUSI Journal and he is a regular reviewer for academic journals.

Recent publications:

• Stefan Lundqvist & Julian Pawlak, “Managing Maritime (In)security on NATO’s Northern Flank”. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2025.
• Stefan Lundqvist, “Relearning the Lessons from the Cold War: Sweden Goes ‘back to the future’ with Its Defence and Security Policy”. In: J. Suchoples, S. James & H. Hanka (eds.), The Cold War Re-called: 21st Century Perceptions of the Worldwide Geopolitical Tension, 2024: 519–39.
• Stefan Lundqvist, “A Convincing Finnish Move: Implications for State Identity of Persuading Sweden to Jointly Bid for NATO Membership”. Studies in European Affairs 26(4), 2022.
• Diana Nilsson & Stefan Lundqvist, “Identifying Weaknesses of CLIL in the Military Higher Education Classroom”. Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, 10(2), 2022.
• Alastair Finlan, Anna Danielsson & Stefan Lundqvist, 2021, “Critically engaging the concept of joint operations: origins, reflexivity and the case of Sweden”. Defence Studies 21(3), 2021.

Conrad Schubert is the Advisor to the Commander Joint Task Force North with a broad remit to include relations with Indigenous and territorial governments, their departments and agencies as well as other federal departments.  

He has lived in the North for over 30 years and spent the last 24 years working in the Canadian Armed Forces’ Team North and traveling throughout the Canadian North as both an infantry officer, and now as a civilian. In nine years at 1 Canadian Ranger Patrol Group headquarters in Yellowknife he gained insight into the essential relationship between the Canadian Armed Forces and the Indigenous people of the North.  He then raised C Company of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and served as officer commanding both full-time and later part-time until 2015 and then again in 2021-2022, looking at the equipment, tactics and priorities of the Canadian army in the North.

Since 2020 he has served as lead planner for the Arctic Security Working Group, drawing together the whole of government with academia and NGOs to examine factors of human security in the Canadian Arctic. He is also the Canadian Action Officer for the Arctic Security Forces Roundtable which brings together the seven Arctic nations with observers from France, Germany, Netherlands and the UK.

Conrad is a graduate of Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. He is also a graduate of the Canadian Forces Land Staff College and holds certification as a ground search instructor, search master and a NCCP Shooting Coach.

Conrad moderates panel discussions on Arctic operations as part of the U.S. DoW’s Ted Stevens Center’s Arctic Regional Security Orientation Course and assists on other of the Center’s courses.  He is an alumnus of the U.S. DoW’s George C Marshall Center in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and of the Ted Stevens Center in Anchorage.  He has briefs on best practices in federal-Indigenous engagement to CIRNAC’s Engagement, Consultation and Accommodation Training course. He is also a member of the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network’s Northern Advisory Board.  

He enjoys being outdoors, reading, family, and languages.

With over 23 years of service in the NOAA Corps, Captain Jeff Shoup currently serves as NOAA’s first full time Liaison to NORAD/USNORTHCOM. In this role he links the two agencies to expand domain awareness in support of national security.

His most recent assignment was serving as Director, NOAA Marine Operations, in which he held responsibility for the operations, shore support and safety of the crew for NOAA’s 15 research vessels stationed throughout the United States. While Director, he led the team out of the COVID pandemic as well as developed and initiated the program to make Professional Mariners in the fleet fully rotational. At sea, he has had the opportunity to sail on both coasts, working as far north as Iceland and the Bering Sea while going as far south as the Straights of Magellan. Previous assignments include; Commanding Officer (CO) of NOAA’s flagship, NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown, returning him to his first ship where his NOAA career began, CO, NOAA Ship Nancy Foster during which time they worked projects for all of NOAA’s line offices and were the first U.S. Flagged Vessel to port call in Cuba in the previous 50 years, as OPS/XO he spent time fishing in the Bering Sea aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson.

While ashore, he spent time in Boulder, CO with the Space Weather Prediction Center, inside the beltway of DC supporting the Search and Rescue Satellite Aided Tracking (SARSAT) program, as well as Commanding Officer, Marine Operations Center – Pacific Islands where he was responsible for the operations and readiness of two ships based out of Pearl Harbor, HI.

A graduate from Miami University in Oxford, OH, and Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business where he earned an Executive Masters in Leadership.

The Honorable Mead Treadwell served as Lieutenant Governor of Alaska from 2010 to 2014 and chaired the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, 2006-2010, under two Presidents. Throughout his career, he has helped shape national Arctic policy, expand international Arctic cooperation, and support the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment. He has advised on space policy as part of NASA working groups during the 1980’s. As Managing Director and later Senior Fellow of the Institute of the North in the late 1990’s and first decade of the 2000’s, he was a founding member of the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, and worked with state and national policy makers to remove the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, building a stronger missile defense relationship with Japan, and to develop and deploy ballistic missile defense in Alaska.

He is currently CEO of Treadwell Development, a strategic advisory and investment firm, and is a fiduciary or advisory board member of firms focused on Arctic investment: QilakLNG, Pt Capital, Iridium, Colossal Biosciences and Nanos.tech. His previous firm Venture Ad Astra conducted research on land and space-based geospatial timing and imaging technologies for several military and intelligence customers. He is an Executive Counselor of the Department of Homeland Security’s ADAC-Arctic at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Treadwell holds a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University, an Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, and a Doctorate of Sciences (Hon.) from the University of Alaska.