ALUMNAE in Science
What does a career in science , technology , engineering and math ( STEM ) look like ? Senior School students had a glimpse into the diversity of opportunities through presentations from visiting alumnae Dr Isla Myers-Smith ’ 98 and Jackie Law ’ 13 , who both participated in the Professional Speaker Series in May .
Dr Isla Myers-Smith is a global change ecologist from the University of Edinburgh . She studies ecosystems in the Arctic and beyond , focusing on how plants respond to climate change . Dr Myers-Smith works with her research group , Team Shrub , using various tools to capture Arctic change in the Yukon and around the tundra biome . She is also interested in how scientists can communicate the impacts of climate change .
Dr Myers-Smith is committed to learning new skills and sharing them with her peers . Her interest in learning how to code sparked the Coding Club , a positive global peerlearning community for coding and data science .
In 2021 , Dr Myers-Smith was highlighted as one of 26 changemakers by National Geographic in association with COP26 . She was selected as one of the WIRED magazine ’ s 25 tech and science innovators in 2020 .
HOW DID TEAM SHRUB START ?
I want to foster collaboration around me , whether that ’ s with my research group , with colleagues at universities around the world and research institutes , or with people in the Arctic . That ’ s why there ’ s the team part of Team Shrub .
The very beginning of the official Team Shrub was during my PhD research . I was working in the Yukon and in some of the same places I work today , and there was one summer where I was able to hire three field assistants . We needed to distinguish between ourselves and another team , so my group became Team Shrub — and the name stuck to this day !
IS WORKING IN THE ARCTIC WHAT YOU ANTICIPATED IT WOULD BE ?
It ’ s a really interesting place , so controlled by climate . You ’ ve got long winters , short summers , all of the organisms out there figuring out strategies to deal with it being freezing in the winter , and they only have a couple of months to do all of their growing and producing of seeds . And then there ’ s this element that is true for the ecosystems and the different species living there and people too — you very much depend upon each other .
When I ’ m up in the Arctic , I feel the vitality of life . You know that life is tenuous up north . Being an Arctic researcher is also inspirational as I try to figure out such a complex system . I hope my research provides a small piece of a big puzzle — how climate change is reshaping tundra ecosystems .
WHAT INSPIRED THE CODING CLUB ?
We wanted to create this informal coming-together to learn a skill set . Not a class , but a club . We have this team of PhD students , undergrads and myself running it through the University of Edinburgh . It started with 20 people . Then we put the resources online , and the online side of it reached much bigger audiences — to date , it ’ s reached over a million different IP addresses , and 50,000 people per month use the tutorials to start their coding journeys . We still have the club element , too , where we ’ ve been able to run things over Zoom so people can join in from around the world .
One of the significant impacts has been increasing the competence of a variety of learners , particularly women , who tend to be more intimidated , I think , by quantitative skills .
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