Royalwood woman picks up STEAM

It looks like Grace Ma has a bright future.

The 18-year-old Royalwood resident is one of seven recent winners of a STEAM Horizon Award, which is a newly-funded prize program that invites the nation’s youth to promote positive changes through their community using science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.

According to a news release, the students will each be awarded a $25,000 prize for their post-secondary education, and the prizes will be funded by the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation Foundation alongside six founding partners.

Ma, who attended Centre scolaire Léo-Rémillard in Grade 9, has just graduated from the International Baccalaureate program at Kelvin High School.

Her passion for creating meaningful change and action has driven her award-winning work as a researcher and presenter for ISAMR (International Student-Led Arctic Monitoring and Research).

"Last summer, I conducted research in the Greater Wapusk Ecosystem, with focus on measuring the active layer thickness of the permafrost and identifying the diverse vegetation on the soil of the tundra, (including) lichen, shrubs, sedges, and mosses," she said.

"I then had the opportunity to present our findings at symposiums such as Wapusk Symposium and ArcticNet. At ArcticNet, I presented our findings on vegetation recovery in a burned bog. We were the only high school group present at both of these events, and so I felt very lucky to have had the opportunity to experience and listen to such an abundant array of Arctic researchers. Additionally, I created a short film of my time in the tundra, which has been shared on various social media platforms to help introduce people to the beauty of the tundra."

Ma said it’s important for her to be involved with this kind of research because "the well-being of our world depends on it."

"For example, due to the rise of global temperatures from anthropogenic climate change, many models predict a 50 per cent increase in forest fires by the end of the century, resulting in significant loss of carbon being stored in permafrost, increasing the net amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Therefore, the quicker and the fuller we understand how things such as forest fires will affect places like the tundra, the better we will know how to manage these fires, and recover the environment better," she said.

Even though she’s graduating, Ma aims to keep in contact with her friends and fellow researchers at ISAMR in "order to follow their future plans and see how I could help or learn from them."

In terms of her future educational plans, Ma is interested in pursuing a degree in environmental biology because she’s interested in exploring "the dynamics of our ecosystem to a deeper extent, and understand the methods we can approach to tend to it."

The teen would also like to obtain an arts degree, too, which could be either English or philosophy.

"I believe that arts and science are highly interdisciplinary, and I like how the STEAM Horizon Awards recognizes this."

simon.fuller@canstarnews.com