When Yolanda Morbey took a summer job on an isolated island off the north coast of Vancouver Island in 1991, it wasn’t living in a lighthouse that excited her. Instead, it was the task of monitoring the growth of chicks.
“That kind of opened the door and made me realize this is something that you can actually do,” she says.
She fell in love with nature and now Morbey is an assistant professor in Western’s department of biology.
Two years after her experience on the island, Morbey graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the University of Victoria. Without taking a break, she moved away from home and pursued her master of science and PhD degrees at Simon Fraser University.
As a student, Morbey had several field jobs during her summers. Once she graduated with her PhD, she worked as a researcher at the University of Toronto for three years. She then moved to Owen Sound for another research project.
Now at her first teaching position at Western, Morbey still spends most of her time conducting research.
Her research project primarily focuses on salmon and she works with three students who study salmon and trout by observing them in different living environments.
“They’re really important species,” says Morbey.
Salmon and trout are not just important for commercial and recreational use.
“They’re important culturally. People want to have salmon living in their rivers. They’re symbolic. They’re important for First Nations. There is a lot of conservation concern about salmon and trout,” says Morbey.
All of Morbey’s findings are published. Her latest publication was a book chapter on the ways salmon might adapt to different living conditions, published earlier this year.
With ongoing publications, Morbey doesn’t get much free time. Her husband, Chris Guglielmo, is also a professor in the Department of Biology. They have a young son, Linus, and daughter, Nora.
“Two kids equals no free time. We honestly don’t have any free time,” says Morbey.
Guglielmo says their jobs are more than just teaching a few classes a week.
“People don’t necessarily understand how much time we spend on research, writing papers, writing grants and if we have several graduate students, which both of us do, mentoring them takes a lot of time,” he says.
But Morbey is not complaining about the workload. She’s happy about where she is in life. She made major sacrifices to be with Guglielmo and have the career she always wanted.
A year after Morbey and Guglielmo got married in 2004, Morbey had a full-time job in Owen Sound while Guglielmo started his teaching career at Western.
“As a family we had to put up with difficult living arrangements for a year while we tried to resolve our career problems,” she says.
Morbey was raising Linus, who was only one year old at the time, on her own. The couple took turns driving three hours between Owen Sound and London to see each other on the weekends.
“We had to really be committed to what we wanted in the long term. We realized that you can’t give up. You just have to wait until the right situation comes along, and sometimes you have to make that situation happen yourself,” she says.
Guglielmo remembers the difficult times. “Living apart with a one-year-old baby was pretty tough,” he adds.
Morbey then had their second child, Nora, in 2006. She took a year’s maternity leave and moved to London. Finally, the opportunity came along and Morbey joined her husband at Western in 2007.
Now that they are together again, Morbey and Guglielmo are both focused on their careers.
“We’re just happy to stay where we are and get our research going. It’s going to be great for our kids to be able to put down roots in one place,” says Morbey.
Fact Box:
Birthplace: Victoria, B.C. Hobbies: backpacking, bird watching, knitting and reading novels PhD project focus: the evolution of salmon Teaches: a second-year course on evolution Looking forward to: attending a conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2010
The writer is a graduate student in Journalism. This feature profiles faculty members hired over the past two years.