Principal Investigator: Emily S. Choy

Dr. Choy is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her broad interests including studying the physiological and behavioural responses of Arctic seabirds as indicators of ecosystem health to environmental change, including the direct (eg. heat stress) and indirect effects (changes in prey, energetics and health) of Arctic warming and other anthropogenic stressors.

She was an NSERC, Fonds de Recherche du Quebec and L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Research Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow under the supervision of Dr. Kyle Elliott (McGill University) and Dr. Grant Gilchrist (Environment and Climate Change Canada).

Dr. Choy has worked in the Arctic since 2007 when she completed her MSc. in the Chemical and Environmental Toxicology program at the University of Ottawa with Dr. Jules Blais, studying the transfer of contaminants (mercury, PCBs, and DDT) via guano from a large colony of northern fulmars to High Arctic food webs at Cape Vera, Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada.

She completed her PhD in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Manitoba under the supervision of Dr. James Roth and Dr. Lisa Loseto (Fisheries and Oceans Canada). Her research focused on beluga whales as a sentinel species of changes in the Beaufort Sea ecosystem, and was part of a community-based monitoring project in partnership with Inuit communities in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, and was supported by an NSERC PhD scholarship and The W. Garfield Weston Doctoral Award for Northern Research.

Dr. Choy is an Explorer-in-Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She was a member of the Victoria Strait Expedition to find the lost ships of Sir John Franklin and a recipient of the Erebus medal.