Marine Science Career Profiles

Stephen F. Cross

Stephen Cross is the President of Aquametrix Research Ltd., a private company specializing in marine environmental assessment and aquaculture research/development. Their main office is located in Sidney, BC, with new branches being developed in Chile and Thailand.

Could you please give me some background on the kind of work that you do here at Aquametrix?

The company was started in 1987 primarily as a marine environmental impact assessment company. I did my Masters on pulp mill effluent discharges into intertidal areas, so my background was largely the impacts of chemicals and waste materials on the marine environment from an ecological perspective. I did my Masters from 1980-82 and worked at the University of Victoria from 1982-84. From 1984-86 I worked for a consulting firm in impact assessment, and then I started my own company and we're still here twelve years later.

I started off doing probably the first environmental assessment of marine netcage culture on the coast in 1987. I got into aquaculture from an impact assessment perspective, and from there the company has grown to be a split between the traditional environmental assessment work (such as municipal outfalls, pulp mills, mining, logging activities and aquaculture impacts) and aquaculture research and development (R & D). On the aquaculture side of things we do new species development from all aspects. For example, we have a crew working at the Pacific Biological Station looking at the potential for black cod culture. We do coastal zone appraisals for different types of aquaculture, both for the province in terms of coastal management and for First Nations looking at traditional area inventories. We also do very refined assessments of specific areas to look at the exact feasibility for starting a farm up on a certain beach or an area of deep water.

Our main office is here in Sidney and we have 10 employees. We're looking at opening an office in Chile this fall and one just south of Bangkok, Thailand in the near future. Because of my involvement with finfish culture impacts for so long I've been asked to go down to Chile and start a company with another firm to deal with a lot of their environmental work related to aquaculture. So its sort of like starting this company over again, but in another country.

What's the difference between working for the government vs. a private company like this?

One of the basic differences is that you're guaranteed a paycheck every two weeks when you work for the government, and if you work for yourself you don't have that sort of stability. But on the other hand, the benefit is that you have total freedom. I pursue the type of work I want to go after, not what I'm told to do. So I'd rather give up the security for my own pathway in life. Its harder and its longer hours but you're doing exactly what you want. For example, you can look for jobs that allow you to go do field work or dive surveys. Or if I want to explore work in Chile or Indonesia I can just go out and do it, as long as I can afford to or it doesn't compromise our other jobs.

Did you always want to be working in this field?

I went to U Vic as a pre-med student, and way back when I took my undergraduate degree there was an instructor by the name of Dr. Gordon Fields who taught natural history of marine invertebrates. I took that course as an elective and it just changed my whole outlook on what I wanted to do because he was so good at getting out in the field. We were out for hours and hours every week for the whole year, and that was enough for me. I went into more marine biology in my 3rd and 4th years, graduated and then did some contract work before going back to get my Masters.

Where was your very first job in marine science?

That's the irony of the whole thing. As you probably know, you go through as an undergraduate and every summer you look for a job so that you can earn some money to go back to school. I never had a summer job in biology at all, but I did have a great paying job with Noranda Mines as a chemist. I'd come back to U Vic and talk to the chemistry students who had spent their summer out paving highways or holding flags, and I was out doing chemistry even though I was a marine biology student!

So I never had a job until I finished, when I got one through U Vic with Western Forest Products. It was an environmental assessment job for the pulp mill in Port Alice. We were looking at pollution abatement measures, recovery of pollutants and improving the environment. It was a two year contract which led into my Masters degree. The company offered to pay me to do my Masters instead of part time consulting work, so I did.

I think you've already mentioned what you enjoy most about your job, but what do you dislike the most?

Now that I'm a family man sometimes you worry when there's drought in contracts or things are slow in getting research projects started, which means the cash flow isn't there. I think if you ask anybody in private contracting from a principle level, they'll say that cash flow is sometimes the most stressful of the whole thing. If projects and political climates are good and there's lots of work out there, you don't even think about money. You think about what you want to do next and what kind of projects you want to work on.

Also, I don't like being inside and doing paperwork...ever! That's why we're not a huge company, because I insist that our senior level project managers are involved in all aspects of the contract. Some of the larger companies have these really big name Ph.D. consultants who win a contract based on their experience and expertise but they don't do any of the work. All of their lower level people do all of the work, and they might grab the report and go talk at a public meeting. I don't think that's kosher and I prefer to be involved in all aspects. If I'm a project manager on a particular study then I will take some technical people with me and we'll all go out in the field and do the study. You then get a fairly intimate appreciation of what's going on in that particular study, so I can talk about it at any subsequent meeting. When I go to write the report, I'm not trying to extrapolate something out of a few numbers on a piece of paper. I've been there and I've seen it. I think it makes a better impression to the client if its presented properly, and its more fun.

What advice would you give to young people interested in getting into this area of marine science?

Its not easy, and you don't appreciate how many people are out there looking for this type of job until you have to go through literally piles of resumes every month. When I look back to when I graduated there were considerably more jobs in the field, and it was still hard. Out of my whole graduating class from U Vic I think I'm the only one who's really working directly in his or her field.

If you're going to be a marine biologist I would suggest not strictly taking marine biological courses. When I went through, particularly during my Masters which made the difference, I focused on a statistical study which was largely quantitative. It was heavy into the statistics to support the biological and ecological aspects of my thesis, and having done that I've come out with a strong expertise in statistics and biology combined. So I can design studies, implement them and analyze them in a credible fashion.

I think you have to marry at least two types of disciplines to really be saleable. Nowadays there's a lot of spatial analysis stuff that didn't exist before, like GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and ARCview. If you're really strong in computers and have the biology degree complimenting it, then you can sell yourself as more than just a biologist. Unfortunately the stack of resumes for either a biologist or a computer scientist is pretty high. But ask how many people in the world have a really strong computing science degree equal to that of a marine ecologist component, and have experience in First Nations negotiations? Right now you'd have a job over 6000 people! Its that kind of evaluation you have to make, and that's not easy to do when you're young because you can't predict what's going to be sellable. But just don't rely on one thing. A general degree in marine biology is going to be a pretty hard sell and you've got to make yourself different from the rest. That's the bottom line.

back to Profiles page