Kelly Foss

When Dr. Craig Purchase’s new PhD student was given an unexpected chance to study in Ireland, he had no idea it would open the doors to an Irish research opportunity of his own.

A volunteer with the Salmonid Association of Eastern Newfoundland (SAEN), Dr. Purchase is an associate professor of Biology and Ocean Sciences. He recognized an opportunity in the angling group’s ongoing efforts to re-establish Atlantic salmon in the rivers that flow to Quidi Vidi lake.

“This is a massive project; tens of thousands of dollars are going into it,” said Dr. Purchase. “I thought I could improve the output for them but also piggy-back some of my own research on their work. It’s a goldmine of a research opportunity; to independently go out and do this kind of research on my own would be almost impossible.”

Last year he pitched a research plan and potential funding opportunity to the association and together they were successful in applying for a three-year National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship (IPS). The funding allowed Dr. Purchase to recruit a PhD student to work with both him and SAEN.

Brittany Palm, the woman he ultimately chose last March, is an international student and it took them several months to complete the paperwork so she could start in September. In the interim, she discovered she had been selected to receive a Fulbright award, which would allow her to spend a year doing research in Ireland.

“At first she thought she would have to turn it down, because although her research was going to be related to fish biology, it was not connected to what she was going to do with SAEN and me,” said Dr. Purchase. “But I encouraged her to investigate it to see how flexible the Fulbright would be, because I knew it would be good for her career.”

After speaking with SAEN and the Fulbright sponsors, they determined there was a window of opportunity that would allow her to travel to Ireland from December to May, which would enable her to be here for SAEN’s busy field work in November and June.

The Fulbright sponsors were also okay with her switching from her original research plan to something related to salmon ecology – which would be the subject of her thesis with Dr. Purchase.

Within a few weeks of sorting out Ms. Palm’s Fulbright details, Dr. Purchase saw a notice from the Ireland Canada University Foundation about their Dobbin Scholarships. These travel awards are available for Irish and Canadian scholars and academics whose research contributes to the rich academic and cultural links between the two countries.

“I contacted a few people I knew who had been working with salmon in Ireland and told them what I was doing here,” said Dr. Purchase. “I asked if they would be interested in me applying for this award, which would enable me to go over there if I got it, to see if we could figure out something we could do together. They thought it sounded great.”

Based on their discussions, and a successful application for a Dobbin Scholarship, they worked out a plan that saw Dr. Purchase travel to Ireland for the first two weeks of December to set up a research project for Ms. Palm to work on over the next five months.

Ireland’s Marine Institute has research facilities in Newport, County Mayo, which supports much of the salmon work in the country. He spent time there, but also with researchers in Galway City at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, which is where Brittany will be based.

 “There are archived scale samples from tagged juvenile salmon that were released in Newport in 2009. Similar to ageing a tree, we are going to see if growth rates in their first few months of ocean migration determine if survivors returned to spawn after one or two years at sea.”

If everything goes well, the research will become part of Ms. Palm’s thesis, which focuses on reproductive ecology of salmon.