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.

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.