Executive Committee

Brett has been a member of the International Wader Study Group for 25+ years and started as Chair in 2025.  He completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University (Canada) studying the breeding ecology of arctic-breeding sandpipers in Alaska.  Brett then held a faculty position at Kansas State University (USA) where he led field projects on the population ecology of Upland Sandpipers and ecotoxicology of migratory waders in the Great Plains and South America, and was one of three coordinators for the Arctic Shorebird Demographics Network.  Brett is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (Norway) where he has been working with Great Snipe and taiga-breeding waders, and serving as the STRP Focal Point for Norway to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

José has been a IWGS member since 2005 (ish) and joined EXCO in 2023. He completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia investigating migratory options, trade-offs and consequences in Black-tailed Godwits, and has been chasing waders between Iceland and West Africa ever since. Following post-docs in the UK, Iceland and Portugal, he is currently a Principal Researcher at the University of Aveiro, and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Iceland. José was a member of the team of editors who transformed the Wader Study Group Bulletin into Wader Study, and was responsible for introducing new features such as Forum and Perspectives. He is currently a Species Expert for the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (under CMS/UNEP) and is highly involved in developing the new Global Wader registry for tracking projects. José was a leader for a successful conservation effort to prevent development of a commercial airport in protected areas of the Tagus Estuary.  The success was only possible due to the contributions of many waderologists and conservationists who shared valuable information on migratory birds.

Verónica joined ExCo in 2022 as General Secretary. Verónica’s first contact with waders was in 2009, when she decided to leave her job as conservation biologist in central America and start a PhD at the University of East Anglia (U.K.). She instantly fell in love with these amazing creatures and the outstanding community studying them! She currently works at the South Iceland Research Centre (University of Iceland), investigating (mostly) individual level responses to environmental changes and associated fitness outcomes in a population of Eurasian oystercatcher breeding in Iceland.

Emma has served as Treasurer for IWSG since 2022. She started working on waders during her master’s projects, and continued while working on her PhD, which focused on the foraging ecology of Sanderlings in the Wadden Sea. Captivated by these small yet resilient birds and their dynamic coastal habitats, Emma is continuing her research on Sanderlings as a postdoctoral researcher at NIOZ, Texel (The Netherlands). Her current work aims to bridge the gap between science and conservation practice by collaborating closely with nature managers to support evidence-based management decisions.

Katharine Bowgen

Katharine joined the ExCo as interim Membership Secretary in 2017, and was formally elected in 2018. She currently works for the British Trust for Ornithology analysing data from wetland and marine bird projects. Her PhD looked into wading bird’s responses to environmental change on UK estuaries and developed predictive models to aid conservationists. Prior to this she worked as an field assistant around the world gaining insights into bird’s behavioural ecology and their conservation in different environmental circumstances.

Jacquie Clark

Jacquie is Editor-in-Chief of Wader Study, and ex officio member of ExCo since April 2018. Jacquie has been captivated by waders since she was an undergraduate, has been a member of IWSG ever since and was on ExCo back in the 1980s.  She is an active member of the Wash Wader Ringing Group and enjoys wader ringing around the world. Her research has focussed on the effects of cold weather on waders, as well as migration and moult. On deciding to quit paid work as Head of Ringing for BTO, she volunteered to get involved with IWSG again and became an editor, quickly morphing into co-Editor-in-Chief and consequently joining ExCo.  In addition to her editing duties, she is having great fun carrying out wader and other ornithological fieldwork, as well as trying to write all those papers there was never time for and finally finding (a bit of) time to work on the house.

Vojtěch Kubelka

Vojtěch has been keen on shorebirds since 2007, when he renewed the Wader Study and Conservation Group (SVOB) in the Czech Republic. He became a member of IWSG in 2009 and a member of ExCo in 2014. Since 2018, he has been the editor of International Wader Studies, the IWSG’s series of ‘special publications’. He is interested in the evolutionary ecology of shorebirds, field research, comparative analyses, science popularization and nature conservation. He defended his PhD: Significance of predation for breeding ecology and conservation in shorebirds at Charles University in Prague. Currently he is the Scientific Coordinator of ÉLVONAL SHOREBIRD SCIENCE, international project investigating sex role evolution in shorebirds.

Delip K. Das (Bisharga) joined the ExCo in 2021 as Conference Coordinator. He immediately becomes a happy member of the Wader Study Group family, after his first attendance at the Workum conference, in the Netherlands in 2018. Dilip is from Bangladesh, now a Ph.D. student studying Black-tailed Godwits in the Conservation Ecology Group at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He became fascinated with the long-distance migration of shorebirds in 2010 when he volunteered for an expedition to search for the rare Spoon-billed Sandpiper on the southeast coast of Bangladesh. Later on, he joined as a Lecturer of Zoology at Jagannath University, Dhaka, in 2013 and directed his energy and enthusiasm to waterbird research focusing on winter ecology and habitat use of waterbirds (Indian Skimmer and shorebirds) in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta (central coast) of Bangladesh besides teaching.

Ryan has been conducting research focusing on the applied ecology and conservation of European and North American waders for the past 10 years. Ryan worked in Canada on the James Bay shorebird project, investigating the stopover ecology of migrating arctic breeding waders. After which, he began work at the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust as a research ecologist on the LIFE Waders for Real project, an EU-funded and farmer-led conservation project which successfully reversed the declining trends of breeding Lapwing and Redshank in the Avon Valley, Hampshire, UK. He is currently completing his PhD at Bournemouth University, where he is exploring the interactions between protected avian predators and breeding waders and is the Director of the English Curlew Recovery Partnership.

Jannik Hansen

Jannik joined the ExCo in 2007. In 1998 he started his first wader work; a master’s thesis on the breeding strategy of the Purple Sandpiper in Svalbard. Next he worked as a fieldworker on a Lapwing breeding biology study in Sweden. Currently he is employed at the Institute of Bioscience, University of Aarhus in Denmark, working with ecological monitoring (incl. waders) at Zackenberg in Northeast Greenland. He took over the role of Projects Coordinator in autumn 2014.

Charlotte has a permanent position as researcher on migratory birds at the French Office of Biodiversity (OFB). She mainly leads research studies on shorebirds now but has a larger background in the field of ornithology and population dynamics. Her work is in between research and expertise, hoping her work could help taking science-based decisions to protect waterbirds. She is very active in promoting women in science (and any form of diversity) and has been selected for the program Homeward Bound to create an international network of women in STEM aiming at protecting our planet.

Scott is a new member of the publicity team for IWSG and helping to develop our profile on social media.

Jutta joined ExCo in 2007, and served as Conference Coordinator until 2015. She completed her PhD on the timing of northward migration of a long-distance migrant wader, the Red Knot, at the NIOZ (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research) and the University of Groningen. Her project allowed her to spend several months each year in West Africa’s most important wintering area for waders, the Banc d’Arguin, Mauritania, then following the Knots to their stopover site on the French Atlantic coast and the German Wadden Sea. After her PhD, Jutta switched flyways and hemispheres and studied the “wintering” behaviour of waders in Australia at Deakin University, Geelong. In 2014 she returned to work on the Banc d’Arguin, Mauritania, and currently she is based at NABU, in Germany.

Gwenaël Quaintenne

Gwenaël joined ExCo in 2017 as a general member and is also the Notes & News editor for Wader Study. In daily life, she is the bird database program manager at LPO/BirdLife France.  Gwenaël is passionate about shorebirds, and had the great opportunity to study habitat choice of Red Knot Calidris canutus islandica (East Atlantic flyway) during a PhD at the University of La Rochelle in France under the supervision of Dr. Pierrick Bocher and in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). Immersed in such enthusiastic and fanatical wader scientists, she was happy to have discovered the International Wader Study Group which brings together researchers and bird conservation organizations from all continents working on shorebird conservation research projects. After successive fixed-term contracts at the universities of La Rochelle and Nantes for studies on shorebirds, Gwenaël now works at the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux (LPO), BirdLife France, as programme manager on bird databases at the Knowledge Service. From bird survey manager to data analyst, she works on Rare and Endangered Breeding Bird Surveys in France, assessment and reporting under Article 12 of the Birds Directive, and assessments of overwintering waterbird population trends in France from the Wetlands International census. Through these programs and the IWSG, Gwenaël continues to maintain an active interest in shorebird science and conservation.  She is glad to receive news about shorebirds and their habitats that can be shared with the readers of Wader Study and IWSG members.

Birgita Hansen

Birgita is the Treasurer of the Australasian Wader Studies Group, based in Australia. She is also a long-term member of the Victorian Wader Study Group and has extensive experience is wader studies including capture and monitoring. She recently led a team of researchers and wader experts in Australia to revise the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Population Estimates for 37 wader species listed under the Australian Government Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. She is currently running a research program on the ecology and migration of Latham’s Snipe, and collaborating with the Wild Bird Society of Japan to understand and document changes in population size and distribution. She is currently working as a Research Fellow in the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation at Federation University in Ballarat, Victoria.

Eveling joined ExCo in September 2018. Eveling is the Chair of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Group (WHSG). She is currently based at Simon Fraser University in Canada and at Centro de Ornitología y Biodiversidad (CORBIDI) in Peru.