Jean Pennycook

Jean Pennycook is an American educator and zoologist specializing in Antarctic Adélie penguins.^[1] She is based in Cape Royds, an Antarctic Specially Protected Area which hosts a stable population of Adélie penguins.^[2][3]

Jean Pennycook holding an Adélie penguin chick

Career

Pennycook first came to Antarctica in 1999 as part of a team from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who were researching Mount Erebus, a volcano on Ross Island.^[4] She publicized scientific research in Antarctica using several science outreach methods, including online journal entries and postcards, video conferences with schoolchildren, and a documentary about the effect of climate change on penguins.^[4][5] Pennycook and her fellow researcher David Ainley run an educational website, Penguin Science, which summarizes the research team's work and aims to attract future scientists to the field.^[6][7] Pennycook has supervised interns in the Polar Internship Program, which aims to enable students of underrepresented racial or social groups to visit Antarctica and become familiarized with Antarctic scientific research.^[7][8]

Pennycook created an outreach project where schoolchildren could send personalized postcards with drawings of penguins sent to her, which would then be returned with an Antarctic postmark.^[2][7] Schools also have the option of designing a class flag to be flown in Antarctica, which can subsequently be viewed through a live penguin webcam on the research team's website.^[6][9]

Publications

• Pennycook, Jean (October 2006). "Penguins Marching Into Your Classroom". Science and Children. 44 (2): 65.
• Kim, S.; Pennycook, J.; Eastman, J. (2011). "Short Note: Antarctic toothfish heads found along tide cracks of the McMurdo Ice Shelf". Antarctic Science. 23 (5): 469–470. doi:10.1017/S095410201100040X.
• Ainley, D.G.; Lindke, K.; Ballard, G.; et al. (2017). "Spatio-temporal occurrence patterns of cetaceans near Ross Island, Antarctica, 2002–2015: implications for food web dynamics". Polar Biol. 40 (9): 1761–1775. doi:10.1007/s00300-017-2100-9.
• Morandini, V.; Dugger, K.M.; Ballard, G.; Elrod, M.; Schmidt, A.; Ruoppolo, V.; Lescroël, A.; Jongsomjit, D.; Massaro, M.; Pennycook, J.; et al. (2019). "Identification of a Novel Adélie Penguin Circovirus at Cape Crozier (Ross Island, Antarctica)". Viruses. 11 (12): 1088. doi:10.3390/v11121088. PMC 6950389. PMID 31766719.
• LaRue, MA; Salas, L; Nur, N; Ainley, DG; et al. (2019). "Physical and ecological factors explain the distribution of Ross Sea Weddell seals during the breeding season". Mar Ecol Prog Ser. 612: 193–208. doi:10.3354/meps12877.
• LaRue, M.A.; Ainley, D.G.; Pennycook, J.; Stamatiou, K.; Salas, L.; Nur, N.; Stammerjohn, S.; Barrington, L. (2020). "Engaging 'the crowd' in remote sensing to learn about habitat affinity of the Weddell seal in Antarctica". Remote Sens Ecol Conserv. 6 (1): 70–78. doi:10.1002/rse2.124.
• Salas, Leo A.; LaRue, Michelle; Nur, Nadav; Ainley, David G.; Stammerjohn, Sharon E.; Pennycook, Jean; Rotella, Jay; Paterson, John Terrill; Siniff, Don; Stamatiou, Kostas; Dozier, Melissa; Saints, Jon; Barrington, Luke (2020). "Reducing error and increasing reliability of wildlife counts from citizen science surveys: counting Weddell Seals in the Ross Sea from satellite images". bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/2020.11.18.388157.
• LaRue, Michelle; et al. (2021). "Insights from the first global population estimate of Weddell seals in Antarctica". Sci. Adv. 7 (39): eabh3674. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abh3674. PMC 8462891. PMID 34559555.