Monika Rogozinska is a journalist, writer, mountaineer, and co-founder of the Polish Chapter of The Explorers Club (2013). She has dedicated more than two decades of her life as The Polish Chapter’s  Secretary and  Chair.

Monika has been awarded two of The Explorer’s Club highest honors, the Citation of Merit and the Sweeney medal, for her dedicated service to the club and incredible accomplishments in exploration.

Tomasz Stachura is one of the foremost shipwreck divers in the Baltic Sea. Highly specialized in underwater photography, Tomasz has taken thousands of photos of wrecks at great depths.

He is the Founder of SANTI Diving and Baltictecha, as well as an author and TV show host.

Maciej Besta is a scientist and explorer from ETH Zurich, and The Explorers
Club Fellow from 2022. He focuses on mountaineering and polar expeditions to
the most inaccessible and the coldest mountain ranges, focusing on Siberia and
its Arctic.  He has organized more than 30 expeditions, including the first
solo traverse of the Byrranga Mountains, one of the least researched areas of
the whole Arctic, or the first winter ascents (January-February, solo) of the highest
peaks in the coldest mountain ranges of the northern hemisphere (Suntar-Khayata
Mountains, Verkhoyansk Mountains). He received numerous exploratory awards
such as the Feat of the Year at Kolosy Symposium (2021) and has been the
ambassador of renowned brands such as La Sportiva.

Scientifically, Maciej works at ETH Zurich on high-performance extreme-scale
irregular computations across different scientific domains; he also worked
scientifically at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He published nearly 50
peer-reviewed papers at top conferences and journals such as ACM/IEEE
Supercomputing or CACM. He received 11 Best Paper awards & nominations, the
title of the Best Student of Poland (2012), the first Google Fellowship in
Parallel Computing (2013), the ACM/IEEE-CS High-Performance Computing
Fellowship (2015), the ETH Medal for outstanding doctoral thesis (2021), and
three other awards for the best doctoral thesis worldwide in high-performance
and scalable computing from ACM, IEEE, and SPEC (2022)

Hubert Kowalski is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. He is a board member at The Association of Art Historians (SHS), the Association of Polish Museum Professionals (SMP), and the International Council of Museums (ICOM). He is also the President of the Association of the University Museums and the Director of the Warsaw University Museum.

His research focuses on the reception of ancient Grecian and Roman culture in European art of the 17th, 18th and 19th century. His work also investigates the looting of cultural goods in the Early Modern Era, the history of museums, and the field of museology.

Tomasz Grzywaczewski is a writer, filmmaker and war correspondent. The author and producer of multiple books,
documentary films, and TV shows, Thomasz has dedicated much of his work to the contemporary history of  Siberia, Ukraine, Caucasus, Belarus and
central Europe.

Andrew Andrzej Pietowski was the leader of the Polish student kayaking expedition Canoandes’81 through the Colca Canyon in Peru. This first exploration of one of the world’s deepest canyons was featured in Explorers Club Journal, National Geographic Magazine, the Guinness Book of Records and magazines worldwide. In 2002, while leading tourists around the canyon, Andrew noticed that most of the income from international tourism went to international companies and bilingual guides from large cities. He began to question why local communities continued to be marginalized by big business and started to work towards possible solutions.

As an international educator, he made the decision to open an English school in Colca for local youth to prepare them for work as bilingual guides and operators in the tourist sector on their native soil.

Since 2004, every summer volunteers have come to Colca to interact with students in local schools. Next year 20 th edition of the summer English school will reach out to Peruvian children connecting past explorations with present needs of the local communities facing an invasion of international tourists.