Dawson Isbister
Seed2STEM Intern Summer 2025
Dawson Isbister joined FRESH as an intern through Seed2STEM program and will be contributing to both lab and field projects aimed at developing a program for our 4th year students. Dawson hopes to one day achieve a career with a masters or PhD in psychology and / or criminology and hopes to deepen his understanding of forestry throughout his time with us.
Originally from Tumbler Ridge Dawson is still adjusting to the wide variety of activities Vancouver has to offer. Outside of campus you’ll often find him exploring local book stores (mainly the manga section), riding the sky train to new parts of the city or meeting new people.
As someone who enjoys learning other languages Dawson has spent the past 11 months learning Italian and hopes to take on Dutch once he feels confident in his Italian fluency. His love for language often flows into his music taste where he can spend hours listening to his favorite bands such as Mom jeans, Modern baseball, Marietta and Oakwood.
Bridget Guo
Undergraduate Intern 2025
Bridget Guo was an undergraduate intern in the FRESH lab working to gain experience in ecosystem modeling and statistical analysis. They completed a B.Sc. in Natural Resources Conservation and have previous experience with coding, performing data analysis and data manipulation under a Co-op term with the Ministry of Forests. Bridget is passionate about statistical modeling and building neat things, and hopes to pursue it further in graduate school. Outside of work, they are often making art, listening to music, or exploring niche spots throughout Vancouver.
Yancun (Walter) Yan, MSc
Masters Defended 2025
Walter Yan master’s project is to use Python programming to build an innovative mathematical modelling framework to simulate and optimize the climate change mitigation potential of the BC forest sector, including both the forest ecosystem and harvested wood product industry. He got a B.Sc. in Forestry at UBC and a B.Sc. in Ecology at Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University in 2022. He was also a Junior Analyst at Forsite Consultants Ltd. in the summer of 2023, mainly working on computer programming, mathematical modelling, and geospatial analysis. Moreover, with a passion for the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and forestry, he also established Forestry AI, an international association for everybody worldwide to learn, share, discuss, and collaborate on any work about AI for Forestry. Walter likes hitting the gym, listening to music, and writing Chinese poems and prose during his spare time.
Jinming (Jimmy) Ke, MSc
Masters Defended 2023
Jimmy Ke came from China. He have a Bachelor’s degree in Forest Resource Management (with honors) from UBC. Currently, he’s pursuing a Master’s degree at the same department at UBC, focusing my research on assessing the climate change impacts of the forest industry at a system level. There is a disconnection between forest carbon management (via harvesting scheduling) and product carbon management (via harvest wood product manufacturing and use) in existing literature. To address this knowledge gap, his research takes a holistic, system-level approach to track the mass balance of carbon from forest management activities to its return to the atmosphere. He consider factors such as carbon sequestration, decay emission from the ecosystem, emissions from forest operations, manufacturing processes, wood product decay emissions, and disposal emissions. By employing a dynamic life cycle assessment method for global warming potential, he examine the temporal variability of the climate change impacts of the combined system of forest management and harvested products. His model provides guidance for the forest industry to adopt climate-smart management practices. His model is created using Python, ensuring transparency, reproducibility, and facilitating knowledge dissemination.
Valentine Lafond, PhD
Post Doctoral Researcher
valentine.laford@agroparistech.fr
Valentine is a forest engineer, ecologist and modeller from France. She completed her PhD in 2014 at the University of Grenoble-Alpes / Irstea and did her first Postdoc at ETH Zurich. In the past, she studied the impact of climate change on European forests, assessed the effects of different management strategies on ecosystem services and analyzed trade-offs and synergies between them. At FRESH, she works on the development of a decision support system to help decision-makers assess different pest mitigation strategies within the framework of the BioSurveillance of Alien Forest Enemies project. When not in the lab, she likes playing outside in the forest, in the mountains or on the water.