Passion for science broadens horizons for Master's student

Jaclyn Brush is fairly certain the first fish she ever caught as a little girl was secretly attached to the end of her line while she wasn’t paying attention by her father, who had hopes of getting her hooked on angling.

The ruse worked. Now a master’s student working in the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, Brush’s love of fishing and her fascination with science have taken her as far as Spain and the Arctic Circle, and will dispatch her to Canada’s east coast this summer.

After the death of her grandmother, Brush originally wanted to go to medical school to become an oncologist, but her love for science and research was encouraged by her academic supervisor Aaron Fisk, an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Trophic Ecology.

“She would come home every day with a neat story about the people she would work with or what kind of analysis she had learned,” said her mother Cathy Brush.

Jaclyn Brush began volunteering in Fisk’s lab in 2007 and a year later, she was off to Baffin Island where she spent about six weeks in Cumberland Sound, studying primary production in the Pangnirtung fjords in order to understand how much biomass, or food energy, is required to support the higher level fish species that inhabit the ecosystem there. During her stay, she got to work with local Inuit guides and fishermen who gave her a fascinating glimpse into their way of life.

“They were really into it and they wanted to know how our research could shed light on what was happening in their ecosystem,” she said. “Because of climate change, they can see such dramatic changes in the systems there.”

More recently, she’s been working with the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources, studying the food web structure of the Bay of Quinte in the northeastern section of Lake Ontario, learning how variances in temperature, depth and nutrients impact the health of the ecosystem and the fish that inhabit it.

“If the diet of the fish is changing that will impact their health or growth rates,” she said. “Knowing that will help us manage the ecosystem for the conservation of those species.”

Besides conferences in Pittsburgh and Toronto, Brush has spoken about her research in Barcelona, Spain, where she made a presentation at the 2010 International Congress of Fish Biology.

Brush will finish her master’s degree at the end of March and will then pursue a PhD at the University of Waterloo. That work will take her to Newfoundland, where she will assess the impact of hydro-electric dams, and study how varying flow rates impact fish community structure and food webs in the area.

“She’s an excellent student,” said Fisk, “an incredibly hard worker with a real passion for science. She’ll be working with Michael Power at Waterloo and he’s a really good scientist. It’s a great move for her and it keeps her in the Great Lakes region. We need more scientists working on Great Lakes issues.”