Joseph Frey

Joseph Frey, CD, FRCGS is Vice-President, Board of Governors of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), as well as Chair, College of Fellows. He is a former Director and Vice-President of The Explorers Club, New York City. Joseph served as a commissioned officer with both the Canadian Army and Royal Canadian Navy. He was a RCGS member of the Parks Canada-led expedition which discovered Sir John Franklin’s flagship HMS Erebus in the North West Passage. Joseph has travelled to over 80 countries and all seven continents.

Some of the other expeditions he has actively participated in include the US National Parks Service’s search for the Spanish slave ship Guerrero off Key Largo, Florida and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Battle of the Atlantic marine archaeology survey of the German submarine U-576 off North Carolina's Outer Banks. Joseph coled an Explorers Club coral reef biodiversity mapping expedition in the Bahamas’ Peterson Cay National Park and engaged in another with the University of Havana in Cuba’s Punta Francis National Park. He dove in the Royal Canadian Navy’s SDL-1 submersible off the coast of Nova Scotia collecting fauna below 167 metres (500 feet) for pharmaceutical research by the National Research Council of Canada. >With a passion for archaeology, an important focus of Joseph’s is on 17th Century Huron-Wendat sites. He was an archaeologist on Ontario’s first winter archaeological excavation which searched for the historic French fortification of Fort Frontenac. Joseph has also worked on paleontology excavations with internationally renowned paleontologist Dr. Phil Currie. Fascinated by polar sciences, Joseph has taken part in expeditions to the Antarctic, Greenland and across the Canadian High Arctic with various organizations including the National Science Foundation, Antarctica New Zealand and the Meteorological Service of Canada. He was one of only seven international journalists chosen to report from the Antarctic on field sciences during the 2001-2002 research season. An accomplished science writer, he has been published in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany and New Zealand in TIME, The Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Geographical, Canadian Geographic, Medical Post and DIVER to name a few. Joseph has contributed to five books on exploration and polar topics, including the Canadian best seller Franklin’s Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery Of HMS Erebus.