Alumni Spotlight

Learn more about what our Faculty of Science alumni are doing by visiting the Faculty of Science blog.

Following a childhood dream - Victoria Arbour

Victoria Arbour

Many children dream about studying dinosaurs when they grow up. Dalhousie graduate Victoria Arbour realized that dream; studying the fossils of ankylosaurid dinosaurs.

Arbour and her colleagues studied a 76-million-year-old dinosaur at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, in the process solving an 85-year dispute over the classification of the species.

“I was lucky. I always knew what I wanted to do," Arbour says.

While at Dalhousie completing her B.Sc. in Biology and Earth Sciences, graduating in 2006, Arbour spent summers identifying calcareous nannofossils from the Scotian Slope, a geologic area off the shore of Nova Scotia, and described a fragmentary dinosaur specimen from the Sustut Basin of British Columbia for her honours thesis, supervised by Milton Graves. She felt very fortunate that she was given the opportunity to do hands-on work for her thesis, and is grateful for the opportunities the Earth Sciences department afforded her.

Finding the right direction - Paul Chafe

Paul Chafe

For Paul Chafe, academic study at Dalhousie was balanced with a strong interest in athletics. While completing a B.Sc. in biology and history in 2006, Chafe was a member of the cross-country and track-and-field teams.

He continues to run at a competitive level, and was ranked second in the 2008 Canada Running Series National Open Rankings. He values the experiences he had on the cross-country and track-and-field varsity teams, and the connections he made there.

“The experiences on the varsity teams were invaluable. My coaches and teammates will be life-long friends and role-models for me,” he said.

Since completing his degree, Chafe has continued studying biology. He moved to Toronto after graduation and earned an M.Sc. in biology, and is now working on his PhD in biology at York University. His current research involves classifying the underlying molecular genetics of distyly, a breeding system polymorphism, in Turnera, a genus of flowering plant (Turneraceae).

Dance and science – a unique balance - Lisa Phinney

Lisa Phinney has struggled to balance dance and science throughout her life, but both bring her joy.

She combined the two in a dance work, which debuted in October, 2009 through Live Art Dance Productions. Called Analogy for Solid Bones, the work brought together her love of science and of dance.

Her thesis project, investigating the link between phytoplankton and their affect on global climate, led to a dance expression of scientific processes called Point/Counterpoint (homeostasis). The dance debuted at Neptune’s Studio Theatre in 2004 and aired on Bravo and CBC TV.

“Practically speaking, it’s a little bit tricky serving two gods, if you will,” explains Phinney, who divides her time between her job as an air quality researcher at Environment Canada and her work as an independent choreographer.

“But in a way, they don’t seem that different to me; they are both expressions of fundamental truth but explained in vastly different ways.”