Meet the Staff

We've provided our contact information and background for your reference. Always feel free to call our office or stop by when you are on campus. We are located in the Diplomacy Building.

Dean of the Graduate School

Dr. Helena Wisniewski

Diplomacy Building Suite 101P
Tel: 907-786-4833
hswisniewski@uaa.alaska.edu

Dr. Helena S. Wisniewski is Chief Executive Officer of Equinox Toys, LLC, a company she founded in 2009 to develop innovative toys using biometrics. She also is a special consultant to the Naval Research Advisory Committee, the senior scientific advisory group to the Secretary of the Navy. From August 2004 until October 2008, she was Vice President, Research and Enterprise Development, Stevens Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the Stevens Institute in 2004, Dr. Wisniewski was the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Aurora Biometrics, Inc., a company she founded based on her patented technology. Before that, she was a senior executive at Lockheed Corporation and a Vice President of the Titan Corporation. She also was Founding Director of the mathematics program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and held a key position at the CIA.

Dr. Wisniewski is a director of Smart Trax, Inc. an educational media company, serves on the advisory board to Soar Technology Inc., which develops, and deploys cognitive software to solve complex problems in training, modeling & simulation, robotics and medical informatics and on the board of Kulper and Company, LLC, where she chairs its research committee.

Associate Dean of the Graduate School

Dr. David Yesner

Diplomacy Building, Suite 101U

Tel: 907-786-1098
dryesner@uaa.alaska.edu

Dr. Yesner's main interests are in environmental archaeology, especially zooarchaeology, in ecological anthropology generally, and in hunting and gathering societies. He has worked in various areas of North America, including New England and the Midwest, as well as in Cyprus, but his main areas of interest include the circumpolar region, especially Alaska, the Russian Far East and southern South America. Recent projects have included archaeological excavations in a number of locations in southcentral Alaska, the Russian Far East, and Argentine Tierra del Fuego.

Currently, Dr. Yesner is involved in three major projects. The first is the 12,000-year-old Broken Mammoth site near Big Delta, Alaska, the site of a project ongoing since 1989. Excellent preservation of animal bone and organic artifacts at this site has made it unique among Paleoindian sites in northern North America, and has allowed an opportunity to reconstruct in detail the lifeways of the earliest colonizers of eastern Beringia (and North America). The second site is the Historic Knik Townsite near Wasilla, Alaska, a large Gold Rush Era community composed of both Euro-American settlers and Dena'ina Athapaskans (Alaska Natives). Excavations of dwelling and storage features at this site is allowing reconstruction of the nature of Native-white interactions in southcentral Alaska from the time of Russian contact to the turn of the century. The third site is the Boisman II site near Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, where Alexander Popov (Director, Russian Far East National University Museum) has been conducting excavations for several field seasons, now joined by student crews from UAA. This Early Neolithic (6500 BC) coastal site has produced a series of elaborate human burials with Eskimo affinities, as well as faunal remains demonstrating the earliest maritime subsistence (including whaling) in the Russian Far East. Students are welcomed to participate in any of these projects.