Jean Pennycook

Jean Pennycook is an American educator and zoologist specializing in Antarctic Adélie penguins. She is based in Cape Royds, an Antarctic Specially Protected Area which hosts a stable population of Adélie penguins.

Career
Pennycook first came to Antarctica in 1999 as part of a team from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who were researching Mount Erebus, a volcano on Ross Island. She publicized scientific research in Antarctica using several science outreach methods, including online journal entries and postcards, video conferences with schoolchildren, and a documentary about the effect of climate change on penguins. Pennycook and her fellow researcher David Ainley run an educational website, Penguin Science, which summarizes the research team's work and aims to attract future scientists to the field. Pennycook has supervised interns in the Polar Internship Program, which aims to enable students of underrepresented racial or social groups to visit Antarctica and become familiarized with Antarctic scientific research.

Pennycook created an outreach project where schoolchildren could send personalized postcards with drawings of penguins sent to her, which would then be returned with an Antarctic postmark. Schools also have the option of designing a class flag to be flown in Antarctica, which can subsequently be viewed through a live penguin webcam on the research team's website.