Say hi in the coffee line

New professor Jeff Pierce goes back-to-school shopping in the bookstore. (Nick Pearce Photo)

September at Dalhousie often feels like one first impression after another, as students get to know their peers, their professors and all the quirks of their new home.

That experience is equally shared by Dal’s newest faculty. Some of them have spent the summer adjusting to life in Halifax; others arrived to campus only days before their first batch of students did. Some come from far away; others from just down the hall. But sitting down with a handful of new faculty to chat, one finds that their first impressions of Dalhousie tend to be remarkably similar: that of a place where their research and teaching is enhanced by a supportive and welcoming community.

“I immediately felt a sense of congeniality at the school,” says Heather Castleden, new to Halifax and the School for Resource and Environmental Studies. “There was genuine warmth from all of my new colleagues, both when I interviewed and when I arrived here on campus.”

Dr. Castleden brings to Dalhousie expertise in socio-political dimensions of natural resource management, with a particular focus on community-based participatory research partnerships with First Nations in Canada. This fall, she’ll be teaching graduate courses on Indigenous Peoples and natural resource issues, as well as research methods. Key to her teaching approach, she explains, is bringing a variety of perspectives into the classroom and taking the class into the community. She connects her other research interests in ethics and health research to environmental studies. “The way I see it is that when you’re working with Aboriginal Peoples, environment and health issues can’t be separated,” she says.

Debbie Martin would likely agree. Her research explores Aboriginal Peoples’ changing relationships to food and how those relationships influence health, with her doctoral research having focused on the Inuit-Métis peoples in southeastern Labrador. She’s not an entirely new face to the School of Health and Human Performance—she completed both her Masters and PhD programs here—but this year she’s joining the Dal faculty full-time and teaching classes in multicultural health promotion, research and evaluation methods, and health promotion theory.

“It’s strange for me because I’m still kind of a student too,” she says, noting that she’ll be defending her doctoral thesis this fall. “I still have a sense of what it’s like to be a student, running around in the first few weeks. But it’s exciting for me to now be on the other side and try to bring something different to the classroom.”

Every new faculty member has their own take on why Dal feels like a good fit for them. Like her peers, Estelle Joubert of the Department of Music cites the sense of community on campus, but also the school’s theatre and film studies programs. They form good connections with her research interests in 18th century opera, opera on film, and music history, the latter of which she’s teaching the first-year course in this fall.

“I have the opportunity to introduce students to current topics in musicology, from ecomusicology, to music and politics, to the historical performance movement – it should be exciting” says Dr. Joubert, who comes to Dal after two years as a postdoc at the University of Toronto following her DPhil degree from Oxford.” She’ll also be teaching a music theory course – she’s a trained pianist and harpsichordist – and a graduate seminar on opera and politics open to non-music majors.

You won’t find Jeff Pierce in the classroom much this fall. He’s spending his first term getting his research lab established in the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science before he teaches computational physics in the winter. Having just completed his postdoctoral work at NASA, his research is helping better understand how human-generated particles in the atmosphere – aerosols – affect our climate. It’s a big uncertainty in our ability to predict climate change and what we can do about it,” he says.

With his bicycle in tow, Dr. Pierce came to Dalhousie after interviewing at four other schools.

“What set Dal apart was that everyone here seemed genuinely happy,” he says. “They all seem to have healthy lives outside of work, and that work-life balance is really important to me. Halifax is just the right size of city too – lots of good food and music – and everyone here at Dal has been so supportive. I really hope I get the chance to keep working here for some time to come.”