Me with Emily Wells at her MES graduation reception.
I’m still catching up on a busy month’s worth of postings, and don’t want to forget to acknowledge a few big milestones. Emily Wells graduated with her MES and it was wonderful to meet her parents, over from Newfoundland for the event. Keahna Margeson finished her comprehensive exams, and Robin Willcocks Musselman started hers. Brooke McWherter led a successful SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant (PEG), partnering with the Agricultural Association of New Brunswick and the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association on Examining experiences in the process of adaptive grazing adoption: Sustainable agriculture in Canadian living laboratories. MREM intern Patrick James joined the team to work with Lara Cornejo on ResNet synthesis modelling and knowledge mobilization as well as Brooke’s PEG. Lara also presented her work at EcoSummit in Australia, and Samantha Howard presented hers at Coastal Zone Canada in Victoria as well as the Canadian Water Resources Association meeting in Halifax, back to back. (The next post will cover the IASNR conference, which was also busy for our team.) Congratulations to all!
Lara and Brooke farewelling Isabel Cotton (centre) on the Halifax waterfront.
While I was away in South Africa Isabel Cotton finished her 12-week visiting fellowship. Thanks to Lara and Brooke for giving her a proper send-off, and thanks, Isabel, for all your hard work.
Finally, in more sober news, there were some awful fires in Halifax (and elsewhere in Canada) in the weeks around my travel. Many people lost homes and many others were evacuated for long periods. I got lots of media requests because of my related work with MES Ellen Whitman in 2013 on peri-urban fire risk, that involved modelling fire risk on Halifax’s fringes. I typically push those requests to Ellen, who went on to do a PhD in Fire Science at the University of Alberta and now works for NRCan. She is an amazing scientist, and it was when looking for a few of those articles (like this one) to cite here that I learned that NRCan nominated her to represent Canadian women in science just in time for International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11, 2022. Belated congratulations, Ellen!
