Rebecca Priestley is Professor of Science in Society at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. She is an interdisciplinary humanities researcher – with degrees in geology, the history of science, and creative writing – whose work focuses on climate change, Antarctica, sea level rise, and nuclear technologies. Rebecca is chair of the INSTANT Humanities and Social Sciences Subcommittee. Rebecca is winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize (2009), The Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize (2016), and was a member of the Melting Ice, Rising Seas team who won the New Zealand Prime Ministers Science Prize in 2019. In 2018 she was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Aporangi. Rebecca works closely with Antarctic scientists and travelled to Antarctica in 2011, 2014 and 2018 on Antarctica New Zealand’s media and education and outreach programmes. Her books include Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica (VUP, 2019) and Dispatches from Continent Seven: An anthology of Antarctic science (Awa Press, 2016). Her creative nonfiction about Antarctica and sea level rise has been published internationally, including in Granta and Griffith Review.
Victoria University of Wellington
