The Water Institute announced that Helen Jarvie has joined the University of Waterloo’s Department of Geography and Environmental Management as a full professor.
“The Water Institute is thrilled to welcome Professor Jarvie to the University of Waterloo,” said Roy Brouwer, executive director of the Water Institute. “Helen’s expertise in the drivers and impacts of eutrophication, nutrient stewardship, and the functional integrity of rivers and watersheds adds tremendous strength to Waterloo’s existing water quality research expertise.”
The Water Institute is in the process of hiring three new senior professors as part of the University of Waterloo’s longer-term commitment to strategic capacity building in the domain of water. Helen Jarvie is the first of these three appointments and she assumed her new role on January 1, 2020.
Jarvie joined the University of Waterloo from the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) where she was the principal scientist in hydrochemistry. She is an adjunct professor in fluvial sciences at the University of Arkansas in the United States, a visiting professor in environmental chemistry at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, and a visiting professor in water quality science at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Jarvie completed her PhD at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
“I am delighted to be joining the Water Institute at the University of Waterloo at such an exciting time,” said Jarvie. “It is increasingly clear that solutions to the challenges we face in water resources management, under accelerating global environmental change, require vibrant, dynamic and multifaceted cross-disciplinary collaborative research.”
“The Water Institute is internationally-recognized for exactly these cross-disciplinary and integrative approaches to research: bringing together water science and engineering, ecological and human health and wellbeing, with the policy, practice, and socio-economics of water management and governance,” Jarvie added. “I am looking forward to working with colleagues across the Water Institute, Canada, and internationally, to explore how improved stewardship of nutrients, rivers, and watersheds can yield multiple benefits for the security and quality of our water resources.”
Jarvie’s research encompasses river-system biogeochemistry from local to global scales, with a particular emphasis on nutrient cycling and water quality. A major focus of her work is on the role that nutrients and nutrient legacies play in lake and river eutrophication worldwide, and how improved nutrient stewardship can help ensure the future resilience of water quality and water resource security. Over the last 20 years, Helen has published over 130 papers in international peer-reviewed journals which have received almost 10,000 citations.
