The public defense of three doctoral dissertations was held on November 23-24, 2016 at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute. Vasily Lytkin and Marina Danzanova have successfully defended their Kandidat Nauk (PhD) dissertations titled respectively "Late Holocene Dynamics of Glaciers and Rocks Glaciers in the Suntar-Khayata Range" and "The Formation and Regime of Supra- and Intrapermafrost waters in Urban Areas: A Case Study of Yakutsk". Twenty members of Dissertation Council D 003.025.01 decided unanimously that both candidates qualified for the award of Kandidat Nauk degree. The Council's verdict was also positive for Leonid Neradovskii, who presented research on "Methodological Bases for Electromagnetic Sounding of Frozen Ground within the Layer of Annual Temperature Variations" for the degree of Doktor Nauk (Dr.Sc.) in engineering. The minutes and resolutions of the Dissertation Council's session can be found here.