Oceanographic (OM): Can you tell us a little bit about your background, please?

Heather Lynch: “In college, my background was in experimental physics. When I went to graduate school, I became concerned with environmental issues. That’s why I transferred into the biology program. Initially, I was working on fire-insect outbreak interactions, but when a postdoctoral position opened up to work in the Antarctic, it seemed like a great opportunity to use my quantitative skills and my modelling skills. I went to the Antarctic just a couple of days after finishing my PhD dissertation to start work on a long-term monitoring program for penguin populations. I’ve been working on it ever since. I fell in love with the modelling aspects but also the opportunity to have a real impact on policy.”

OM: How did your fascination with the Antarctic regions develop?

Heather Lynch: “When I took my first trip to the Antarctic, we had a field camp at a place called Petermann Island where we were camping and monitoring the penguins. What I think drew me to it initially is just how little information there was and how much it needed some more sophisticated modelling tools. Fairly early on in my career, I got a chance to go to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting as part of the Secretariat to see how the policies around the Antarctic were being developed. It was a really great window into how policymakers were making decisions and what kind of data they might need to make good decisions. That started off my journey working at the interface of the policymakers and building relationships. That’s a very difficult work because it’s very time consuming. Those meetings are very slow. It feels like the policies will never come to fruition, it feels like nothing is ever happening, but behind the scenes, over years and years, the relationships that you build with policymakers and scientists, do move things forward in terms of conservation.”

OM: Was the involvement with policymaking something that you had in mind when you started?

Heather Lynch: “Yes, for sure. In fact, I never envisioned going into academic research. I always imagined that I would go into a conservation organization. But I saw that I didn’t have to choose. In some sense, I could take an academic tract and still have a big role in policy. Everything I do, I think of it being policy relevant. We very much want to answer questions that policymakers have and that has allowed us to be quite creative in terms of developing new tools or new skills. I think that we’re still pushing things forward in terms of basic research, but it’s all driven by this larger goal of trying to understand how the analytics are changing so that the people that are designing protected areas have all the information that they need. That’s why a big focus of my lab’s research is what we call ‘open science’, which is looking at the question: how do we not just do the science, but create data sets that are of maximal value and are publicly available? That’s why everything we do goes online immediately, and we try and shorten that gap between discovery stage and dissemination. Often, we will share our results with policymakers even before it’s gone through peer review. We might change the way we think about this after it has been looked at by the scientific community, but I don’t want to wait on results I think are important for a year or two while it goes through the peer review process. We try and get our results to the policymakers as quickly as possible so that they have it in hand when they need it.”