Early in her career, Geneviève Ali worried that, to find work, she’d have to deal with a triple threat of biases. Not only is she a woman, she’s also young and African-American.
“My parents were instrumental in helping me frame this triple bias as a triple opportunity,” she says. “Being a woman has given me the tremendous responsibility of nurturing new women scientists and contributing to better female representation in STEM. Being African-American gives me a voice to promote diversity and inclusiveness. And being in my early thirties gives me a unique perspective on work-life balance issues, especially when it comes to advocating for the importance of a social life and hobbies for young academics, and understanding the time it takes to commit to a life partner and starting a family.”
Ali is now an Assistant Professor of hydrology at the University of Manitoba, and is the Junior Chair of the University’s Watershed Systems Research Program. She works mainly in the Lake Winnipeg watershed, using a variety of tools to quantify the movement of water and its constituents (i.e., sediments, chemicals, organisms). “I tie this knowledge to environmental issues that have societal significance, such [as] floods, droughts, and water pollution,” she says. “I’m particularly interested in engineered landscapes, where natural water movement is altered by surface drainage, farms, dams, and other human landscape modifications.”
She’s come a long way from Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, where she lived from age 1 to 15 and was raised as a native French speaker, before her family moved back to Montreal. Her parents supported the pursuit of both scientific and literary careers, as her mother was a translator and her father an electrical engineer. “When my parents worked late, my sisters and I would play music or spend time exploring the confines of libraries and bookstores,” she recalls. “But as long as I can remember, I’d wanted to be a volcanologist, as I’d seen a volcanic eruption on TV and was absolutely fascinated.” Her mother thought she could find something less dangerous than hot lava to work with, and in the end Ali chose geography, as there was no volcanology specialization at Université de Montréal. She hasn’t looked back since.