I'm so grateful to join you this evening. I greet each of you from the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin people. I acknowledge their stewardship with gratitude.
I am a professor of biology at University of Ottawa, an ecology researcher, a research chair holder, a past president of a scientific society and an executive member of NSERC. I have long been involved in working on science to inform policy and on policy for sustaining science. Most importantly, I'm a parent who cares about the world my children will inherit. Like each of you, I wear many hats. Like everyone here this evening, I'm doing my best to make a difference for others.
It’s a long road to become a scientist. Completing an undergraduate degree in any scientific discipline is frankly tough. That degree often culminates in a research project that provides a taste of what discovery requires. It’s easy to doubt yourself through these difficult years. Will I discover anything? Do I have what it takes? And what comes next?
For a researcher in training, what comes next is graduate school. For many, that means a doctorate. The best bridge between an undergraduate and a graduate degree is a scholarship from a federal granting council. Such scholarships help enormously, but they are falling increasingly far below the poverty line. They are also incredibly hard to get.
The resulting hypercompetition imposes a filter that excludes many talented people from pursuing their dreams of contributing as a scientist. I drew the term “hypercompetition” from the recent report on discovery research in Canada by the Council of Canadian Academies. It simply means that the competition is so fierce that excellent people are excluded arbitrarily. Hypercompetition filters excellence out of our system.
A student completing her doctorate is usually in her late twenties, a long way yet from becoming an independent scientist. There are still years to go as a post-doctoral researcher, requiring more hypercompetitive applications for fellowships. By the time this scientist completes her post-doc, she's probably in her thirties, at least. If she finds a position as a researcher, she'll need to obtain more funding. Of those funds, 60% go directly to student support. To sustain her career, she's going to need to publish her and her team's discoveries frequently in good-quality research journals, which impose steep fees for that privilege.
There are so many gateways to pass before becoming a scientist. Each of us experiences these gateways, these filters, differently. I am not called by hateful racial epithets on the bus, but some of my students have experienced just that. When I attend meetings, I do not have to worry about unwanted physical contact in the hallways. And yet, such things, and worse, can be a fact of life for some in our community. The hard work we are doing towards inclusion must continue in granting councils, in institutions and in our labs.
Yet, there are many extraordinary moments that make being a scientist the most rewarding career I can imagine. Moments of discovery and learning make those years of training and effort worthwhile. For me, discovering ways that climate change pushes species towards extinction resonated deeply, and pointed also to solutions. Leading students through the Serengeti to work on conservation changed my life as well as the lives of those students.
Scientists enjoy extraordinary trust from society. That trust is both sacred and provisional, and it needs constant renewal. A great way to do this is through citizen science, which mobilizes communities to participate in data collection. We started building such programs in my lab more than a decade ago, starting on Canadian butterflies. How can people not trust evidence when they have collected it themselves?
Canada needs its scientists to remain engaged, speaking passionately and with humility about the awesome mysteries of nature that we study. So in your study of Canada’s science and research ecosystem, I hope you'll remember that it is our researchers who make Canadian science extraordinary. Where hypercompetition and bias stifle excellence or filter it out, we are missing opportunities to bring all our talents to bear on the defining challenges and mysteries of our time.
With that, I thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening.