The final event in the 2019-20 Aquatic Research Group (ARG) Seminar Series features McMaster University Professor Karen Kidd presenting a talk titled “Local through global influences of human activities on mercury in aquatic ecosystems.” It takes place on Wednesday, March 11 at 12:30 p.m. in room 111, McLaughlin College Building at the Keele Campus. The seminar will be followed by a free lunch at 1:30 p.m. All members of the York community are welcome to attend.
The pan-Faculty ARG Seminar Series, organized by biology Professor Sapna Sharma in York University’s Faculty of Science, has brought top ecologists from across the province to York to talk about their research in aquatic ecology and what’s causing stress in our waterways.
Karen Kidd
Kidd received her BSc in environmental toxicology from the University of Guelph (1991) and her PhD in biology from the University of Alberta (1996). As an ecotoxicologist, she studies how the health of aquatic organisms and food webs are affected by human activities and the fate of pollutants in freshwater ecosystems.
Kidd joined McMaster in 2017 as the Jarislowsky Chair in Environment and Health and has a joint appointment in the Department of Biology and the School of Geography & Earth Sciences. Before that, she worked in the Biology Department and the Canadian Rivers Institute at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, where she was a professor of biology and held a Canada Research Chair in Chemical Contamination of Food Webs (Tier II 2004-14; Tier I 2015-17).
Most of her lab’s research is multidisciplinary in nature – a combination of ecology, biogeochemistry, chemistry and toxicology – and is on lakes, rivers, wetlands and coastal zones spanning tropical through Arctic climates.
The ARG includes researchers who focus on aquatic science from the Faculties of Science, Engineering, Environmental Studies, and Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. The seminar series is designed to engage this multidisciplinary scientific community at all levels, including graduate and undergraduate students, both at York University and in the wider aquatic science community.