Weddell Sea and Dronning Maud Land (WSDML) Group Welcomes New APECS ECR Representative

The Weddell Sea and Dronning Maud Land (WSDML) Regional Working Group (RWG) warmly welcomes Magkena Szemak as the new APECS Early Career Researcher (ECR) Representative, and looks forward to her contributions to the community and collaborative Southern Ocean research. Magkena will take over from Rebecca Konjinenberg, who will rotate into the WSDML RWG leadership team.
We congratulate them to their new positions!

Magkena Szemak is a third-year Ph.D. student in Coastal and Marine System Science at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Her research uses Antarctic marine sediment cores to reconstruct ice-sheet retreat and Southern Ocean paleoenvironmental change. She specializes in diatoms, which are well preserved in Antarctic sediments and provide key insights into past sea ice, ocean productivity, and circulation. Magkena has participated in multiple Antarctic expeditions and is currently analyzing legacy cores from the eastern Weddell Sea and Dronning Maud Land to better understand regional ice–ocean–atmosphere interactions and long-term climate variability. She looks forward to engaging with the WSDML and SOOS communities and contributing to collaborative polar research, particularly through the development of best-practice sampling protocols and the analysis of key legacy datasets. When she’s not in the lab or breaking ice aboard a research vessel, Magkena enjoys yoga, watching movies, and walking her dog, Lucy!