Grenfell Campus, Memorial University Moses Adjei Postdoctoral Fellow (WP5) Moses Adjei is a Marine Social Scientist and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Science and the Environment at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Grenfell Campus. He has been working on FOCI’s WP5 – ‘Building collaborative interdisciplinary research infrastructure in Atlantic Canada’s lobster fisheries’. Within the past year, Moses has collaborated with FOCI’s WP5 team and leaders of Lobster Fisheries Associations (Lobster Node) to co-develop a survey and interview tools for tracking the socio-economic benefits of lobster to communities, municipalities, and Provinces in Atlantic Canada. Moses has also participated in several conferences and seminars under the FOCI project in Canada. He has strong research interest and experience in working with coastal communities. Specifically, Moses’ research focuses on women and gender, coastal livelihoods and wellbeing and marine resource governance. His studies have been published in reputable journals including Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Comparative Family studies, Rural Sociology, Ocean and Coastal Management, The Extractive Industries and Society, and Gender, Place and Culture, Coastal Management and Maritime Affairs.

Brian Veitch Co-investigator (IWP1) Professor Brian Veitch is the NSERC / Husky Energy IRC in Safety at Sea at Memorial University’s Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. His research focuses on the safety of people who work in complex socio-technical systems, especially those who work at sea. During the last 20 years, he has supervised more than 260 graduate students, research associates, and undergraduate co-op students; published more than 270 journal and conference papers; and secured over $15M in research funding. Veitch will serve on the FOCI Advisory Committee and is an investigator in IWP1.

Carissa Brown Co-investigator (WP2) Dr. Carissa Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Memorial University and has 18 years experience conducting experimental and observational studies in Canadian forest ecosystems. C. Brown is the lead of the Northern EDGE Lab, where her research group focuses on the impact of climate change on plant species across their distributions. She does this primarily in forest ecosystems, studying both understory plant and tree populations and communities, typically at the edge of their range. She combines field experimentation and observational studies to answer questions related to biodiversity and land-use change, disturbance, abiotic characteristics, and biotic interactions, analyzing these data using tools such as mixed-effect modeling, Bayesian approaches, and multivariate statistics. Her ongoing research programs include a large-scale field experiment distributed across Newfoundland testing the ability of native temperate tree species of eastern North America to expand their distributions into boreal forest stands under climate change. Previous research in Canada’s subarctic treeline has involved propagating and planting out tree seedlings across a natural field experiment. Her research funding and collaborations span Federal (NSERC, Parks Canada), Provincial (Research and Development Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador), and international (International Arctic Science Committee) bodies. She has published 21 peer-reviewed scientific articles in journals ranging from Canadian Journal of Forest Research to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. C. Brown’s research has been featured in the journals Nature and Science, and she has been a guest on regional CBC radio programs as well as the national science program ‘Quirks and Quarks’.

Grenfell Campus, Memorial University Sara Langer-Smith Research Assistant (WP7) To learn more about Sara Langer - Rural Resilience

Memorial University Yousra Abdelhady Master's Student (WP1) Yousra is pursuing another master’s degree in Ocean and Naval Architecture Engineering at Memorial University. Her thesis focuses on the Safety of Fishing Vessels, specifically on the effect of length to breadth ratio on dynamic stability. She is a Naval Architect with over a decade of international experience in the shipbuilding industry. She has worked in Canada, Netherlands, and Egypt, covering various aspects of naval architecture, project management, production, and modelling. Her top competencies are multitasking, ship stability and weight distribution. She holds a bachelor and master’s degrees in Naval Architecture from Alexandria University in Egypt, as well as a PMP certification and a train of trainer credential. She is also a Techwomen fellow, and a registered Professional Engineer in British Columbia and Alberta. Besides her technical expertise, she is also an active volunteer for SNAME, serving as an Alternate Functional Vice President for Knowledge management and the social media and Events Chair for SNAME Canadian Atlantic Section. She is also part of the communication team of Maritech conference 2024. Moreover, she has mentored and facilitated various hands-on workshops for different age groups.

Memorial University Pierrette Janes-Bourque Master's Student (WP2) Pierrette Janes (she/her) is a Master’s of Science in Geography student at Memorial University’s campus in St. John’s, NL, and is co-supervised by Dr. Carissa Brown and Dr. Joel Finnis. Pierrette is from the beautiful, nature-filled province of New Brunswick where she spent most of her childhood exploring local forests. After completing her Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership from the University of New Brunswick, Pierrette’s interest in forests led her to a position as Stewardship Coordinator for the Nature Trust of New Brunswick, working closely with local conservationists to protect, monitor and restore some of New Brunswick’s unique natural spaces. Pierrette’s research with FOCI will focus on climate smart trees and urban forests as a potential nature-based climate solutions in coastal communities in Newfoundland.

Doug Smith Co-investigator (IWP1) Assistant Professor Doug Smith of Memorial University’s Faculty of Engineering and Applied. Science researches complex socio-technical systems. He has developed an approach called the process monitoring and performance measurement (PMPM) method for investigating these systems. The PMPM method provides insights into the how complex systems function by modeling the interactions between people, organizations, and technologies. Smith is an investigator in IWP1.

Madeleine Gustavsson Collaborator (WP9) Dr Madeleine Gustavsson is a Researcher at Ruralis – Institute for Rural and Regional Research in Trondheim, Norway. Before joining Ruralis, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter (UK), holding an Economic and Social Research Council New Investigator fellowship, researching the changing lives of women in small-scale fishing families in the UK and Newfoundland. As part of the Women in Fisheries project, Madeleine visited Memorial University in 2018 as a visiting postdoctoral fellow where she also got to learn about the Newfoundland fishery and collect data with women in Newfoundland fishing families. Previous to this, Madeleine conducted research on fishing cultures – including intergenerational and gendered dimension – in North Wales, UK which led here to secure PhD in Human Geography at the University of Liverpool. In addition to publishing on the topics of fisheries, gender and Blue Justice, Madeleine has co-edited the book ‘Researching People and the Sea’ published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. More broadly, her research focuses on marine, coastal and rural issues drawing on social science methods to understand the lifeworlds of people living and working with the sea. Dr Gustavsson will collaborate with the lead and postdoctoral fellow of FOCI’s Work package 9.3.

Memorial University Christine Knott Postdoctoral Fellow (WP9) Dr. Christine Knott is a post-doctoral fellow with the Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI) in the Department of Geography at Memorial University, working with Module M3 – Social License and Planning in Coastal Communities. Her research expertise aims to develop a better understanding of the current gendered and racialized labour processes within the aquaculture and seafood processing industries and their dynamics within communities and workplaces. These explorations allow Dr. Knott to investigate the significance of the interactions among resource dependent communities, government policies, global corporate capitalism, ecological and economic mobility regimes, and animal enclosure and commodification. Dr. Knott will be affiliated with FOCI Work Package 9, Inclusion, social justice and equity in urban and rural coastal communities.

Memorial University Alexandria Major Research Assistant (WP1) Alexandria is a Research Assistant II with Future Ocean and Coastal Infrastructures (FOIC) at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her research focuses on fishing vessel safety and in particular aiming to improve and reduce the environmental footprint of marine vehicles by design and operation. She completed her masters in engineering (M.Eng) in Ocean and Naval Architectural Engineering at Memorial University. Her masters area of research involved investigating the manual performance and usability of emergency signalling devices for cold maritime environments. From her research she authored a paper in the journal of Applied Ergonomics titled " Investigating manual performance when using push buttons following cold water hand immersion." She was a Teaching Assistant at Memorial University for the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science during her masters program in which she was a TA for a variety of engineering undergraduate courses in the department of Ocean and Naval Architectural Engineering. She completed her undergraduate degree in engineering at Memorial University where she had the opportunity to work abroad in Hamburg, Germany and London, England for some of her co-operative engineering placements. Her fields of interests are safety engineering, offshore structures and arctic engineering.

Memorial University Finbar Hefferon Research Assistant (IWP3) More to come.

Yolande Pottie-Sherman Co-investigator (WP9) Dr. Yolande Pottie-Sherman is an Assistant Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. She is a specialist in the study of urban geography and Canadian immigration policy, with a focus on new immigrant destinations. In the last 6 years she has authored 11 peer-reviewed articles on migration, including in in top-ranked geography and migration studies journals Geoforum (a leading human geography journal, 5-Year Impact Factor 3.6), and in the highest ranked migration studies journals: International Migration Review, Migration Studies, and the Journal of International Migration and Integration. She co-leads the Adaptive Cities & Engagement (ACE) Space, a research lab promoting social justice and inclusivity in small cities.