Emily found her passion for ecology while growing up in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains near Los Angeles, California. Her curiosity about the natural world led her to graduate with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biology from the University of California, San Diego. Emily’s interest in coastal ecosystems since prompted a northward move to Vancouver, BC, where she recently completed her PhD in Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Her thesis focused on understanding the effects of human activities, space, and time on eelgrass-associated invertebrate and microbial diversity. You can learn more about Emily’s research on her personal website.

Emily enjoys sharing her love for nature with others and teaching science to folks of all ages. She believes education and community engagement is at the core of implementing effective and long-lasting management of coastal ecosystems. She is thrilled to share her personal objectives with IMERSS: science is for everyone. As Chair of the Board of Directors, Emily aims to promote collaborations and effectively guide projects through to completion.

Hannah comes from an interdisciplinary background spanning social sciences, writing, artistic movement-based practices and coastal/forest ecology. Merging a deep love for nature with a passion for creative expression, she has collaborated on a number of interdisciplinary projects, including the ecological dance film Verge: Dancing a Scarred and Sacred Landscape and the site-specific performance Water Bodies, which explored dance as a medium to embody the flow of Vancouver’s buried creeks.

During her seven years working with the Ancient Forest Alliance, Hannah helped to facilitate community-based outreach, communication and research around the conservation need for BC’s ancient forests. Her current role with the Southern Gulf Island-based Ecological Research Network involves creating materials for community engagement based on current and emerging forest and watershed research. In tandem with this work, Hannah is currently pursuing her PhD in Data Visualization at SFU, focusing on the communication of forest carbon data to convey forests’ role in mitigating climate change. 

With IMERSS, Hannah enjoys sharing tools and insights across disciplines, exploring ways to support the diverse communities of the Salish Sea bioregion.

While pursuing her PhD in Biological Oceanography, Elaine was introduced to Electron Microscopy. She now runs world leading electron microscopy labs at UVic which are open to every discipline.

The whole of the biological, chemical and physical world is of interest to Elaine, especially in how they overlap. She views the living world as an astonishing, wonderful place. One of her mandates is to get more science into elementary and middle schools and provide support to teachers—a large percentage of whom come from an arts background.

Elaine’s master’s degree included a benthic meiofaunal investigation of an intertidal zone, and it was an open research project for Galiano. Sorting and identifying organisms is an intensive undertaking, and she needed help. What better way than to make it a citizen science project through IMERSS?

For more information about Elaine’s career, see her interview in Women in Science.

Raised in the Mt Baker foothills, and a full-time Saturna resident since 1988, nature has always been Pam’s home—and in particular, the Salish Sea Basin.  

A recent widow, Pam shares her home with her cat Milo, and Maggie and Ruffy, her Cardigan Corgis. If not in the woods or in her lab, you’ll find her out in her flower beds. Her motto is, “why grow vegetables when you can surround yourself with flowers instead?”

Initially specializing in fungal inventories of Saturna’s Winter Cover Provincial Park & Ecological Reserve 15, Pam was generously supported with grants from The Friends of Ecological Reserves. These projects ended when the land became part of Gulf Islands National Park. She also kept a loose running fungal inventory of the rest of Saturna, which became more important when her BC Parks work ended.

Pam’s latest big adventure is a contract to produce a BC Slime Mould Field Guide for the Royal British Columbia Museum—which she finds very exciting and kind of scary too!

To connect with Pam and view photos of her specimens, find her on the iNaturalist app.

An ecologist with over a decade of experience studying British Columbia’s interior and coastal ecosystems, Andrew’s passions lie at the intersection of natural history, community-based research, and biodiversity data science. Beginning with an apprenticeship to lichenologist Trevor Goward, his studies have since progressed through a dynamic career in the environmental sciences, working with NGOs, First Nations, academe, industry and government. Currently, he is collaborating with the Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound Biosphere Region Initiative to develop a biodiversity assessment framework, while pursuing a PhD in biodiversity data science in the O’Connor Lab at UBC.

Andrew is perhaps most well recognized for his commitments to community-based biodiversity research as the curator of the Biodiversity Galiano project, for which he was recently recognized with an Islands Trust Community Stewardship Award. Symbiosis is the notion that inspired his love of natural history to begin with, and it is this notion that continues to inspire his local and regional commitments to community science.