Genevieve Ali obtained a bachelor’s with Honours and a Ph.D. in environmental geography at the Université de Montréal, specializing in catchment hydrology, before pursuing her postdoctoral research at the Northern Rivers Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she expanded her expertise into ecohydrology. She held faculty positions first at the University of Manitoba, then the University of Guelph, before returning to her hometown of Montreal to join McGill as an associate professor in August 2022. She is currently cross-appointed to the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Department of Geography. Genevieve founded the Ecohydrological Systems (ECOHYDROS) Laboratory to combine her areas of expertise—physical geography, ecohydrology, and complex systems science—under a unified research umbrella.

The importance of water, to Genevieve, lies in its multifaceted nature. It is a precious resource required for human and ecosystem health; it is somewhat renewable, but not indefinite; it has shaped cultures, supports livelihoods and recreational activities; and it can present a threat to those same livelihoods and activities. Being a hydrologist allows her to study those facets and their interactions, learning from and about humans and nature in an integrated way.

Outside of the lab, Genevieve enjoys beaches, mystery TV shows and novels, and knitting. In another life, she might have been a volcanologist.

Corinne is a third-year undergraduate student in McGill’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, majoring in Environment and specializing in Water Environments and Ecosystems. With ECOHYDROS, she works mainly on the Arrhythmic Rivers website, creating content and doing research for it. Over the summer of 2024, she also helped collect and analyze samples during the fieldwork season.

Her first job was as a bottling assistant operator in a factory that produced health supplements, but after two summers working there, she decided to look for jobs that were more in line with her field. She began working as an environmental awareness officer for her home municipality of Vaudreuil-Dorion, where she stayed for two summers, and would have returned in the summer of 2024, had she not heard about and been accepted to work as a research assistant in the Ecohydrological Systems Laboratory. She was excited for the opportunity to participate in research and discover more of her field of study. This experience has taught her not only about hydrology, but also about its impacts on other fields like ecology and biology.

When not researching Quebec’s rivers, Corinne enjoys reading, listening to music and going to concerts, playing video games, and spending time in nature.

A late-comer to the field of environment coming from a background in psychology, Seonaid began their second Bachelor’s in Environment at McGill in 2022 after having rediscovered a passion for nature during the pandemic. Since beginning their studies, they have worked on a climate-curriculum-writing project for John Abbot College, performed volunteer research for environmental justice causes, and, most recently, worked in Dr. Geneviève Ali’s Ecohydrological Systems Laboratory. Here, they are helping to develop content for this website and other science outreach projects and assisting with the set-up of a long-term riparian monitoring network at McGill’s Gault Nature Reserve.

Hydrology, to Seonaid, is connection; waterways reflect topography, tell us about flows we can’t see underground, provide life to plants and animals upstream and downstream, are individually changeable and yet their network remains constant, linking the oceans, sky, and land. Growing up in Montreal, Seonaid always had a passion for forest streams when able to get out of the city, and is enjoying revisiting that interest in a scientific capacity.

Outside the realm of academia, Seonaid enjoys mycophagy, games, politics and activism, science fiction, picking up new arts and crafts for a month and then forgetting about them, and cosmology and particle physics.