Anna Kerttula de Echave is an anthropologist and was the Program Director of the Arctic Social Sciences Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation for almost two decades. Her research has spanned three decades of fieldwork in the Arctic, during which she has covered a diverse range of research topics, from land use patterns and subsistence economies to identity, household organization, and domestic violence. Her host populations have been equally diverse including the Yup’ik, Dena’ina, Pribiloff Aleuts, and the Siberian Yupik and Chukchi of Russia. Under Anna’s guidance, the Arctic Social Sciences program has increased over 300 percent both in the number and size of awards and in the diversity of awards and the diversity of investigators. Currently the ASSP portfolio includes archaeology, ethnology, theoretical linguistics and endangered languages documentation, community participatory research, social psychology, social history, human geography, sociology, political science, economics, and interdisciplinary research. As Program Director, Anna focused on ways to create partnerships between Arctic Indigenous communities and academic researchers; from encouraging and funding Arctic Indigenous investigators and organizations to a multitude of educational programs that give rural Arctic students science experience and promote their interests in the sciences. In addition to her position in the NSF Office of Polar Program’s Arctic Sciences Division, Anna was the co-Program Director of NSF’s collaboration with NEH on the Documenting Endangered Languages program, and sat a number of cross-directorate working groups including ADVANCE, Navigating the New Arctic, and others.Anna was the Science Fellow to the US Embassy in Iceland in 2013 and returned in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 to the University of Akureyri to teach a class on People's of the Arctic for the Polar Law School. Anna served on the Social, Economic and Cultural Experts Group of the Arctic Council's Sustainable Development Working Group and is currently serving as the Chair of the Internal Review Board of the Jefferson Institute, Washington, DC.