O'Brien Fellows

Marthe Haarr

Marthe grew up in Stavanger, Norway. She attended an international high school where she took the International Baccalaureate to improve her English and prepare to study abroad. Before she headed off to university, however, Marthe spent a year in the high Arctic studying photography and outdoor pursuits. She moved to Saint John in September 2005 to attend the University of New Brunswick. At UNBSJ she took a BSc in Marine Biology during which she made the most of field courses offered and studied sharks in the Bahamas, went on the Study in Africa program and attended the Marine Semester in Saint Andrews, NB. She also took an Honours looking into whether or not harbour porpoises are displaced by an aquaculture cage site.

When she finished her undergraduate degree she decided to stay in Saint John and continue her education. Marthe started an MSc in Biology looking into the effects of different invasive green crab populations on the survival of juvenile lobsters. Upon completing her MSc she was offered a PhD position with the “lobster node” of the NSERC Canadian Capture Fisheries Research Network. This was a unique opportunity to work on a groundbreaking project involving fishermen all throughout the Maritimes, five different universities and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that she could not turn down, so she decided once again to stay at UNBSJ. Her PhD work will look at larval supply and quality of lobsters throughout its range in Atlantic Canada and will fill an important knowledge gap to improve our management of this extremely valuable fishery.

Guillaume Landry

Born in Caraquet, Guillaume Landry graduated from the Polyvalente Louis-Mailloux in 2003 as recipient of the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He moved on to study undergraduate physics at the Université de Moncton, developing an interest for research fostered by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Undergraduate Student Research Awards Program. He completed his bachelor studies in 2007, obtaining a second Governor General’s Academic Medal.

Funded by the New-Brunswick Medical Physics Bursary Program and an NSERC Graduate Scholarship, he was accepted in the Medical Radiation Physics program at McGill University. He studied two years in Montreal, developing software tools for medical imaging research for his Master’s thesis.

Following a 2009 McGill graduation, Mr Landry left Canada and joined the research team of the MAASTRO radiation oncology clinic in Maastricht, The Netherlands, as a PhD candidate. His research touches on topics such as the calculation of radiation dose from radiotherapy and computed tomography imaging.

Patrick Roussel

Patrick J. Roussel is from St. Jacques, New Brunswick. He received his Bachelor’s as well as his Master’s degree at the University of Ottawa. He is now working on his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Montreal, which will study Alaric 1st (King of the Visigoths).

Mr. Roussel is adopting an historiographic as well as a sociological/anthropological approach to the study of the ancient civilizations. He wishes to express his thanks to the Leonard and Kathleen O’Brien humanitarian foundation for the fellowship granted for 2011.