Professor Paula Kankaanpää is the Vice-rector for Research at the University of Lapland and has been the Director the Arctic Centre in Finland for nearly a decade. The Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi, Finland, is a multidisciplinary research and a science communication institute and has an international staff of 70 people. Its Science Centre Exhibition is visited by about 100,000 guests annually.
Earlier, Dr. Kankaanpää worked for the Arctic Council, the Barents Council and the Antarctic co-operation in Finnish Ministry of the Environment. She is geographer by background and received her PhD in sea ice science at the Finnish Institute for Marine Research.