Mead Treadwell

Mead Treadwell, Fellow National ’02, is former Lt. Governor of Alaska, 2010-2014, and has been involved in Arctic exploration and political/economic/environmental cooperation in the region since the late 1970’s when he focused his undergraduate work in history and policy at Yale on Law of the Sea and developing better methods to manage fisheries in the North Pacific and Bering Seas. In the early 1980’s he traveled extensively

in the then-Soviet Arctic region and across the Canadian North, worked to organize the 1988 Friendship Flight which opened the border between Alaska and Eastern Russia and brought families divided by the Cold War back together. In 1990, he led two expeditions to Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic, and traveled the Chukotka coastline to pioneer Arctic ecotourism in the Bering Sea region. During his work with the community of Cordova, Alaska during the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, 1989-1990, he was a co-founder of the Alaska-based Prince William Sound Science Center.