Undergrad co-ops with remote sensing lab lead to PhD program at UCLA

Yiyao Li will be on the move again this summer and says associate professor Alemu Gonsamo is a big reason why.

“Dr. Gonsamo changed my life,” says Yiyao.

Six years ago, Yiyao left her hometown of Luoyang – one of the oldest cities in China with nearly three million residents – and arrived on her own at an international high school in Welland, Ontario. She was 17 years old and spoke little English. All of her family and friends were back in China – there wasn’t a single distant relative living anywhere in Canada. She knew no one at the school.

While it billed itself as the “University of Toronto Preparatory School”, lots of Yiyao’s classmates were making plans to go to McMaster. Yiyao decided to find out why. She’d always loved nature and McMaster’s environmental science programs stood out.

She applied and was accepted into the Honours Earth & Environmental Sciences Co-op program. Yiyao’s first paid co-op was with the Gonsamo Group, McMaster’s Remote Sensing Laboratory.

Yiyao showed up ready to learn and work hard. Alemu – a Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing of Terrestrial Ecosystems – was impressed and offered Yiyao a second co-op, a summer research assistant position and agreed to supervise her fourth-year senior thesis.

“Dr. Gonsamo was such a supportive and patient mentor. He makes time for everyone in his lab and respects our efforts.”

Yiyao quickly became adapt at remote sensing using satellite images and modelling of data through machine learning. She put those skills to work on two key projects in Alemu’s lab. The first looked at variable retention harvesting, a forest management technique that keeps certain trees during harvest to promote bioversity and maintain carbon sequestration. The second project studied peat depth and carbon storage in the Hudson Bay Lowlands – it’s the world’s second largest peatland complex.

Yiao was the third author on “Retention forestry as a climate solution: assessing biomass, soil carbon and albedo impacts in a northern temperate coniferous forest” published in Science of the Total Environment and the lead author on “Peat Depth and Carbon Storage of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, Canada” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Last September, she was offered a co-op at Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment working as a junior environmental scientist in Conservation and Parks. Alemu had written a glowing reference letter.

He wrote another one when Yiyao applied to the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Impressed by what she’d already learned and accomplished as an undergrad at Mac, Yiyao was offered direct entry into the department’s PhD program. After studying peatlands in Hudson Bay and the forests around Turkey Point, Yiyao now hopes to study how climate change is affecting tropical forests.

Making another major move to a part of the world where she knows no-one doesn’t faze Yiyao. “You just have to dig deeper within yourself and find the courage to reach out for big opportunities.”