Catherine Proulx, M.Sc.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST
Catherine is an environmental scientist with over 8 years of experience in environmental monitoring, with a focus on aquatic biology and statistical analyses.
Since joining Kilgour & Associates in 2015, Catherine has worked on and led numerous biological monitoring programs, including Environmental Effects Monitoring (EEM) programs (both Routine Monitoring studies and Investigations of Cause (IOC) studies). This included projects for oil sands and metal mining clients in Fort McMurray (Alberta), Northern Saskatchewan, Thompson (Manitoba) and numerous cities in Ontario such as Timmins, Levack and the Greater Sudbury Area. She has comprehensive field and laboratory experience, having led the collection of water samples for chemical analyses, sediment samples for both chemical and grain size analyses, and fish tissue samples for metals analyses. She has led benthic invertebrate community surveys, which are indicators of fish habitat, and analyzed benthic endpoints of density, richness, evenness, diversity and community composition. She has also collected and processed sentinel fish for estimation of survival (age), growth (size at age), reproduction (relative gonad size) and condition (condition, relative liver size) endpoints. Finally, Catherine has extensive experience in report-writing, having assisted and led in the development of numerous Study Designs and Interpretive Reports.
Catherine has worked with various government agencies, conducting literature reviews and making recommendations on environmental indicators and trend assessments. Catherine assisted in the development of models to assess ecosystem services such as water purification for Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Ecosystem Potential Index for Canada (EPIC) project. Similarly, she worked on Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC) Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) program, reviewing trend assessments and reporting options for the water quality indicator. She has worked on developing indicators for the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) and Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), as well assisted in establishing normal ranges of variations for water, benthos and fish collected from the Athabasca River in Alberta. Catherine compiled metals and inorganics data from various freshwater monitoring programs across Canada and characterized the background concentration ranges of the analytes to inform chemical risk assessments by ECCC.
Catherine is certified as a Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) project manager.
Catherine is currently completing a PhD program at the University of Ottawa, where she is assessing the toxicity and bioaccumulation potential of Radium-226 in fingernail clams.