Good evening. Thank you for the invitation to appear as a witness in front of this committee on an important topic. I'm joining you from Liverpool in the U.K., as I'm here working for the week, but I've lived in Chicago in the United States since 2011.
Today, I want to tell you about my background, the trajectory of my career that led me to be working outside of Canada, and some challenges that I see Canada facing in retaining and recruiting talent.
While I have lived outside of Canada for over a decade, I am a proud Canadian. I attended the University of Calgary, where I completed my Bachelor of Science in ecology and my Master of Science in conservation ecology. I was the first in my family to earn any university degree.
Having a passion for science and research, I continued my education and completed my Ph.D. in environmental biology and ecology at the University of Alberta, finishing in 2007. As a Ph.D. student, I held an NSERC graduate scholarship and a Killam graduate scholarship. I completed a post-doctoral fellowship that was funded by the Alberta ingenuity fund. I point out these awards not to boast, but as an indication of the investments made to support my education and training, for which I am grateful.
As an aside, I want to point out that the post-doctoral fellowship I held from 2007-09 had an annual salary of $48,000, which is more than what an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship is currently worth, 15 years later.
In the second year of my post-doctoral position, I looked to enter the job market with the intention of applying for positions as a professor. There were very few jobs available in Canada in my field, and that year I applied for only two or three jobs. I was not successful in obtaining one of those positions, and I took an international job for one year. I then returned to Canada and again entered the job market. The second time, in 2010, there were no job postings at Canadian universities for positions that were aligned with my field of research.
In terms of my field of research, I am a population ecologist, and I study a wide variety of plant and animal species. I am interested in the patterns and drivers of fluctuations in biological populations over time and space. A large component of my research program is on the reproductive patterns of conifer tree species in the boreal forest. Their seeds are critical for forest regeneration, and patterns of seed production drive the dynamics of a suite of seed-consuming species and their predators. My research occurs across scales, from local to continental and global scales, and has implications for understanding the consequences of global change.
Coming back to my situation in the job market, since the late 1990s I had heard talk that there would be academic positions opening up soon at Canadian universities due to retirements; however, I found that those positions were not materializing. Every job I applied for in 2010-11 was in the United States, and I got a tenure-track job in the United States. I did not set out to leave Canada, but I did not have options in Canada to move forward with my career.
Leaving Canada to go work in a different country brought along challenges but also opportunities. Moving to a new system in a new country where I knew little about the National Science Foundation funding structure was a challenge. Funding rates were low, and the application procedure was very different from that at NSERC.
However, I have become quite successful in obtaining federal funding in the United States. Over the past five years, research grants that I have had a leadership role on have been funded to the total amount of approximately $1.6 million Canadian. The investments that the National Science Foundation makes in research grants, training grants and support for long-term data collection, as well as synthesis work, provide a meaningful and broad variety of support for science and research, from which I and my research have benefited.
I maintain connections with Canada, both personally and professionally. I hold a lifetime membership in the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. I care about science and research in Canada. I want my colleagues, particularly those who are early in their careers, to be able to stay, be successful and not have to leave.
The number of Ph.D.s graduating from Canadian universities has increased over time, while the availability of tenure-track faculty positions has gone down despite retirements. There is also a trend that contract teaching faculty, who do not do scientific research, are replacing many tenure-track positions.
Short-term contract faculty are cheaper to employ than tenure-track faculty, and this could be a strategy for dealing with reductions in government funding for universities. Increasing government support for universities to ensure they have the ability to replace and increase tenure-track faculty positions is critical to retaining scientists in Canada.
I also suggest that increasing federal investments in research, including in broad-scale, long-term research infrastructure that parallels that in other countries around the world, would be a wise initiative to support research and discovery.
Thank you.