Happy International Women’s Day
Happy International Women’s Day 2023!
Each year we celebrate UN Holiday honouring and celebrating women! We proudly reflect on the incredible role that women play in our lives and in our science. One way we choose to celebrate is by gathering Dept of Integrative Biology and GLIER communities together to share a lunch and dialogue exchange on barriers and facilitators to science and full participation by all. It’s hard to believe that this will be our fifth year of holding an IWD event!
Globally, the theme for this year’s DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality and the hashtag #EmbraceEquity. For HHL, this has provided us the opportunity to use social media as a powerful tool for connecting with local and global communities about our research. At the same time, there is a gender gap in information technology fields which only widens economic and social inequalities.
We are even more grateful for our incredible Science Communication team which includes Director of Communications & Inaugural Lab Storyteller Shayenna Nolan, Outstanding Scholar Giulia Vilardi, Undergraduate thesis student Salma Al Ghazaly and many other incredibly gifted individuals. Together they have been showcasing the many dimensions of our science, making visible the science journey our team is taking, with the aim of reducing barriers to science. Telling our stories and supporting women in science has never been more critical, and we will continue to use digital tools to help generate positive change and support increased representation of women in science.
Finally, we’d like to send our warmest congratulations to Alyssa Frazao, our dedicated lab manager/research associate. Since 2019 Alyssa has played a critical role in HHL, helping shadow Dr. Febria to help build the foundational elements of HHL’s science operations. From training students in the lab on the provincial and federal protocols used to identify benthic invertebrates to teaching students field safety and standard stream ecology protocols, our lab wouldn’t function without her. Alyssa has helped make all of our research accessible to our team, community partners and the public, including being a key person in our lab’s research services in benthic biomonitoring and water quality [see links below]. There are not enough words to express our gratitude on this International Women’s Day and the privilege it has been to work together as a team.
