2022 Award for Excellence in Leadership: Isabelle Côté 

Biological Sciences Professor, Dr. Isabelle Côté began her career at SFU in 2005. Since that time, in addition to training many graduate students, postdocs and honours students, even training some to become scientific divers, Côté has also served on more than 25 graduate student communities throughout BC, Oregon and even in Mexico.

Ensuring graduate students are supported has always been at the forefront of Côté’s work at SFU.  Prior to serving as department chair from 2019 – 2022, Côté served on the Departmental Graduate Studies Committee and also connected with the Biological Sciences Graduate Caucus, particularly when graduate students were having issues.

PhD student, Hannah Watkins, says, “as department chair, Côté created a dedicated slot at all departmental faculty meetings for graduate student to share their concerns.”

Watkins, who served on the Graduate Student Caucus, adds that when students were seeking support for student-supervisor conflicts, students would prefer to go to her directly instead of lodging a formal complaint.

“Most notably, in her time as chair, Isabelle quickly became known as being a safe and trusted authority figure to turn to for advice. Students frequently told me that they had never felt so supported by a faculty member before. Her empathy for graduate students is unrivalled and our department is simply a better place because of it,” says Watkins.

In addition to her formal responsibilities as Department Chair and serving on Committees, Côté also set up structures to not only support her and her graduate students’ research, but that also have positive impacts on the department as a whole.

This includes establishing and growing the Earth to Ocean research group, which is now recognized as THE leading graduate training in applied aquatic ecology and conservation in Canada; teaching the widely popular, BISC800 – Skills for a Successful Scientist graduate course, where she emphasizes writing, public speaking, time management, grant and CV writing; and, she continued to serve as the University Diving Safety Officer since 2009.

This, as current chair, Tony Williams says, “[she’s] pretty much single-handedly maintaining SFU’s capacity to train graduate students (and post-docs) who need to use SCUBA diving for their research. Several students and postdocs have told me how valuable this availability of training was in their decision to come to SFU.”

We congratulate Isabelle Côté for her dedication and commitment to centering graduate students at the heart of her work at SFU, making her well deserving of this award for leadership.

The 2024 Dean of Graduate Studies Awards for Excellence are open for nominations. Deadline for nominations is May 17, 2024.