Lesley Dampier

I developed a great curiosity for the outdoors when I was young as I sailed, paddled and hiked throughout the province with both my family and through organizations like the Girl Guides of Canada. I spent a year in Ottawa working as a Page in the House of Commons where I watched the original Kyoto debate first hand. This experience showed me how much policy makers depend on professionals for guidance and strengthened my resolve to gain a better understanding of environmental science.

My undergraduate degree brought me to the University of British Columbia where I started in the Agricultural Sciences program. I quickly realized that all of my favourite courses were electives in Geography and switched to that major while staying enrolled in as many soil science courses as possible. Geography gave me an appreciation for landscape scale environmental processes while soil science gave me something that I could truly sink my teeth into. During this time I had the fortune of working on a research project in the Kluane region of the Yukon. Through this experience I knew that I wanted to return to both research and the Yukon once I finished my degree.

After one year working as a research assistant, I moved into environmental consulting, working primarily on projects related to land reclamation and residuals recycling. After four years of technical and project management experience, and a little travelling on the side, I enrolled in the MSc Natural Resources and Environmental Studies program at the University of Northern British Columbia in January 2008 where I am co-supervised by Dr. Paul Sanborn and Dr. John Clague from SFU.

My research brings me back to the Yukon where I will be examining soils at central Yukon upland sites spanning a range of glacial histories. This research will address critical questions of pedogenesis, soil morphology, chemistry, and mineralogy in an area that experienced multiple ice-sheet glaciations of varying extent. The study will focus on soils formed on deposits of the Reid (80-150 ka) and pre-Reid (0.2 to 2.6 Ma) glaciations in the eastern Dawson Range.

Education

MSc (Natural Resources and Environmental Studies) enrolled, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC

BSc (Geography) 2003, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

For more information, please send e.mail to: lmd12@sfu.ca