The first time Sam plunged into the chilly waters off Victoria, Canada he was fascinated by the lives of the creatures living beneath the waves, only reluctantly returning to the surface. A trip to Ecuador cemented his love of marine megafauna and, after completing a BSc in Ecology he was determined to participate in research and conservation.

A natural tinkerer Sam has been disassembling and fixing things since he was a small child, a skill that has proven useful to MarAlliance. Sam initially joined MarAlliance for a 6 month media/research internship in 2015 where he helped with research, outreach and fieldwork. Since then, Sam has been an important part of the development of our Deep Baited Remote Underwater Video systems and durable inexpensive field computers, and improvements to our equipment. His latest project is an inexpensive Conductivity Depth Recorder and Temperature Depth Recorders that will greatly expand our environmental data collection capabilities.

When he isn’t working for MarAlliance, Sam is a Live Animal Technician at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Canada.