News

The GREAT Retreat 2014

Graduate students and researchers examining Atlantic Ocean trajectories

July 11^th – 12^th at White Point Beach Resort

This retreat, funded by Doug Wallace’s CERC.OCEAN grant, aimed to connect graduate students and researchers across Dalhousie University with a common interest in the ocean.

As early career scientists it is essential to look towards the future, and with increasing global pressures we need to think about new challenges associated with our oceans. The main goal of this retreat was to facilitate cross-campus collaborations across Dalhousie University, and leave the retreat with the potential for actual collaborations. Students and post-doctoral researchers from different disciplines (marine management, marine law, marine biology, oceanography, and geology), but with a shared interest in the ocean, met to discuss the main issues facing the Atlantic Ocean in the next 100 years. In four diverse groups, these students and researchers created proposals to deal with these key issues (as defined by our group), contemplating the scientific goals for these proposals in addition to the social and structural needs. We left the retreat with a collection of multidisciplinary projects that could be spearheaded here at Dalhousie University, and created a network of students across the university, in a number of disciplines, who can work together to tackle future issues in the oceans from the bottom-up.