[1][2] Steven Amstrup was born in Fargo, North Dakota, where he took an interest in bears at an early age.
[3] In 1975, he began working for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Wyoming[2] where he studied pronghorn antelope and sharp-tailed grouse.
In 1980 he moved to Alaska where he took over the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's fledgling Polar Bear Research Project.
During his 30-years in Alaska, he studied polar bear ecology, primarily in the Beaufort Sea.
[4] In 2007, Amstrup's team of scientists prepared nine reports leading to the 2008 listing, by United States Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, of polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.