Goodbye 2025 and hello 2026
Jan 1, 2026
2025: A Year of Transition and Momentum
In many ways, 2025 felt like a year I had been working toward for a long time. It was a year of transition marked by completion, new responsibilities, and change. It brought the conclusion of my PhD, the opportunity to take full responsibility for course design and instruction, and the start of a postdoctoral position in a new country. Together, these milestones shifted my work from training and preparation toward greater independence in both research and teaching. Looking back, what stands out is not just what happened, but how many of these moments felt impossible to earlier versions of myself. Shoutout to my fellow first-generation women in STEM!
In April, I successfully defended my PhD, passing with minor revisions. Completing the PhD marked the end of a very long period of research training, interrupted by covid requiring a change in research plans, and a break to welcome by child. Finishing this degree was both an academic milestone and a reminder of how access, support, and persistence shape who gets to stay in science. And I would never have been able to do it without my supervisors, Drs Paul Treitz and Ross Hill.
Later in August, I began my postdoctoral position at NMBU in Norway. Although still early, this transition has been exciting both professionally and personally. While still using time series to understand forest change, my focus has shifted from impacts to drivers. This is also my first time living abroad, and indeed I had sought out only opportunities outside of Canada at this stage of my professional development
Another fun and meaningful experiences this year was serving as the course instructor for Remote Sensing II: Digital Image Processing at Queen’s University. This was the first course I designed entirely from the ground up, from learning objectives and lectures to assignments and assessments. I was previously the instructor for Spatial Analysis and Biogeography, but I leaned heavily on hand-me-down materials.
Looking Ahead to 2026
In 2026, I plan to place greater emphasis on dissemination, collaboration, and community engagement. An abstract that I submitted has already been accepted for a presentation at ForestSAT. I plan to submit abstracts to Nordic Oikos and IBFRA too. And for Nordic Oikos, I am co-developing proposals for special sessions, one focused on long-term ecological monitoring and another on remote sensing.
On the research side, my big goals are to publish! This includes a review on the use of remote sensing to examine tree-level responses to climate, and an original article using a high-temporal-resolution multi-year time series of multispectral UAV data to examine within- and between-year spectral trends in the boreal forest. I have spent much of the early stage of my postdoc developing a pre-processing workflow to get these data analysis ready, and I cannot wait to dig into the fun questions in 2026! Both projects aim to better connect remote sensing methods with ecological interpretation, my happy place.
I also want to be more deliberate about building collaborations. Much of my first year in Norway involved focused, heads-down work while adjusting to a new place. But one of the big reasons I came to Norway was to engage more deeply with researchers working at the interface of remote sensing and ecology here and more broadly across Europe. I need to invest more time making new connections and developing collaborations going forward.
Finally, I remain committed to open science and science communication. You will be able to find me here, all year, so stay tuned! I also plan to continue developing my new project: How to Read Science. Rather than offering step-by-step frameworks or productivity-oriented advice, the project focuses on helping readers develop more careful, context-aware ways of engaging with scientific literature.
Ultimately these goals build towards creating a research program emphasizing collaborative and open workflows focused on connecting remote sensing with ecological understanding of forest change. I got the PhD, I got the postdoc, time to start building towards the future because it will be there before I know.