Three Carleton PhD students earned $10,000 scholarships from the Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies (ACUNS) for projects researching Canada’s North.
ACUNS is a national, non-profit academic association dedicated to the advancement of northern scholarship. Each year the organization offers up to 18 scholarships to Canadian post-secondary students through the ACUNS awards and scholarships program in support of northern research in all disciplines. This year, the program awarded scholarships to 11 students across Canada totaling $95,000.
The 2020-21 ACUNS scholarships awarded the projects of Carleton University PhD candidates William Twardek, Willow English, and Krista Zawadski.
Twardek, a student in Carleton’s Cooke lab — which focuses on research primarily related to freshwater and marine fish — won the Polar Knowledge Canada POLAR Scholarship for his research project “Assessing the fate of returning upper Yukon River Chinook Salmon.”
The four-year project is focused on researching where Chinook Salmon are completing their life cycles, observing the impact of a Whitehorse hydro dam on the salmon, and how well the fish ladder in Whitehorse works at getting salmon around the dam.
The hope, Twardek said, is that expanding data about declining populations of Chinook Salmon in the North will result in better protective measures and restore salmon habitats.
“I love the work I am doing now where I can address issues with freshwater fish in northern ecosystems,” Twardek said. “I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done up here to protect these somewhat untouched and beautiful ecosystems.”
For Twardek, the POLAR Scholarship is invaluable financially and will help him pursue his interest in contributing to the conservation of freshwater ecosystems in the North.
“It also provides some confidence about the things you’re doing because people are noticing your work and appreciating it,” Twardek said. “I think it creates a lot of optimism for students that there are good things to look forward to.”
English, a student in both Carleton’s Bennett lab and the Smith Lab, won the Canadian Northern Studies Trust (CNST) scholarship for her research “Carry-over effects in Arctic-breeding shorebirds: A cross-species comparison.”
The project studies several species of Arctic-breeding shorebirds looking at a variety of traits like physiology, length of migration, and breeding locations through the use of modern technology to produce the greatest diversity of data. English said she aims to study how past experiences and environmental conditions affect the bird’s current state as well as identify some of the traits which affect whether a bird experiences carry-over effects.
“Arctic breeding shorebirds and shorebirds, in general, their populations are crashing and so we want to do what we can to stop that and help their populations recover,” English said. “In order to do that, we need to identify when and where the causes of decline are occurring.”
“My main goal is to have a positive impact on the conservation of these birds that I work with,” English said. “And to help stop the decline of these birds and help them recover.”
English’s project supervisor, Dr. Paul Smith of the National Wildlife Research Centre and Carleton biology professor, said student research is crucially important because it is how all academics begin.
“One of the critical roles of academia is training young people to become the leaders of science in the years to come.”
Zawadski, a PhD student in cultural mediations, won the POLAR Northern Resident Scholarship for her project “Qatiktalik: Nexus of Colonial Encounters.”
According to Zawadski, her project is about reinterpreting Inuit history through Inuit eyes. The project is concentrated in a specific Northern Hudson Bay site, which in the early 1900s, had a large portion of ethnographic material removed from the area and spread to museums across North American.
Zawadski is working to turn this practice on its head and connect Inuit with these belongings in museum collections and talk to them about their historical family stories.
“My ultimate goal is always to connect people to museum collections, a big part of my perspective is decolonization and to Indigenize these institutions,” Zawadski said. “These objects are sitting in museums being curated by non-Inuit, non-Inuit are writing about these things, and that’s not the way to go.”
For Zawadski, the POLAR Northern Resident Scholarship will ease the financial constraints of being a student and allow her to invest in resources relating to her continuing research.
“This is our history, this is our cultural heritage, these are our cultural belongings and we have the right to engage with them,” she said.
Featured image provided by ACUNS.
