Rising to the challenge: the Naylor report and Canada’s young researchers

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Kristin Horsley, PhD candidate, McGill University:

I’m a PhD candidate in clinical health psychology here at McGill, and I research how depression and anxiety influence the heart during pregnancy.

The Naylor report was an excellent example of a very broad-spectrum review of what’s going on with science research, in particular the tri-agency councils in Canada. And I think the overall message is that we need to really be investing in the early career researchers, but that kind of has to happen at a variety of levels. In your early career you also need your mentors; so while we need to support the early career researchers, there seems to be a broad recommendation for just an overall investment in Canadian research.

Researchers that I know, both at the graduate level and maybe even kind of starting out as an assistant professor, we’re just a little bit concerned. The morale seems to be not necessarily low, but we all feel we’re at an inflection point.

My expectation is that Canada and – and Canadian researchers – will rise to some of the challenges that we face today. I think that a lot of the problems that we have, whether it comes to chronic diseases or environmental issues, they’re complex. They require a variety of different perspectives in order to answer the questions and to make changes, and I think that Canada really needs to rise up to that.

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