Encounters and Serendipity: A Snapshot of My Career

I finished my PhD in Botany at Duke University in 1985. My challenge is thus summarizing over 40 years of scientific research in 45 minutes. As a PhD student, I was intrigued by how scientists built their careers, and as a postdoctoral fellow, I wondered what would be “my expertise.” Because “hindsight is perfect sight,” I now have the luxury of looking backward to disentangle the threads of what became my career.  I will first bring you into the past, sharing impressions of my early endeavours, then explaining how they linked to some of my major contributions to science, climate policy, forest conservation, and teaching. My talk will be more about trajectories than about methods and data.  But do not worry, I will present some important results that we obtained over these years.

This event has been co-organized with UBC Emeritus College.

Dr Catherine Potvin is a distinguished tropical forest ecologist whose research advances understanding of carbon dynamics, biodiversity, and community-based climate solutions. With decades of fieldwork in Panama and Latin America, her work has shaped international climate policy, including through her service as a UN climate change negotiator for Panama. She has published more than 100 scientific articles in leading journals such as Nature, Science, and Global Change Biology. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she was the first woman to receive its Miroslaw Romanowski Medal. Dr Potvin leads Sustainable Canada Dialogues, a national network of scholars developing climate action policy, and is a Trottier Fellow at the Trottier Institute for Science and Public Policy.

Dr Potvin is in residence at Green College for five weeks, beginning in mid-March.