Research colleagues who still talk to me...

Research in my fields is collaborative and dynamic. I've not only had fabulous students, but, in the past >30 years, I have worked with wonderful supervisors, mentors and peers. While I am always looking for new research collaborators, I keep in touch with many from the past. I thought it would be fun to include webpages about these colleagues and mentors, and celebrate them, especially if they are still returning my emails and taking my phone calls (and believe me, research collaborations ruin as many friendships as they strengthen!).

First up is Professor Emerita Judy Myers, of the Zoology Department, University of British Columbia. Here's Judy, in early October 2013, reading Charles Krebs' latest book, while waiting for me to buy an Ikebana kit at Granville Island, Vancouver, BC. On Ada Lovelace Day, I raise my hat to Judy.

I met Judy in the mid-1980s, when she was on sabbatical in Oxford, in the Zoology Department, where I was doing my doctorate. We got talking about plant-anti herbivore defences, ended up doing some research together on prickliness in brambles, in Wytham Woods, and she invited me to co-author a book, that we finished 16 years later, in 2003: Ecology and Control of Introduced Plants. The young woman in the photo counting prickles, is Debbie Gibson, an undergraduate at York University, who co-published with us after I got back to Canada.

When Judy retired in 2007, her colleagues organized a wonderful symposium of talks and a dinner in Vancouver, which I was delighted to attend. Here are some slides from the presentation that I was honoured to give, in which I aimed to emphasize that Judy's strength as a scientist comes from her unstinting drive to ask tough, experimental questions, be sceptical and listen to everyone - including young graduate students. Plus - she was willing to roll up her sleeves and do my laundry, when I flew to Vancouver, leaving my young kids in Toronto, to write, and she really nagged me to publish - and it really is a publish or perish world.