Carol Devine

Carol Devine is a global health professional, researcher and writer. Carol is Humanitarian Advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Canada on climate change, health and sustainability. For MSF she was the past Access to Essential Medicines Campaigner, Program Manager and Humanitarian Affairs Officer in Rwanda and Southern Sudan. Carol co-authored a cultural history book The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning (HarperCollins 2015) based on a civilian international ecological expedition she led with The Russian Antarctic Expedition in 1995-6. She was a fellow of Ecologic Institute’s Arctic Summer College researching climate change and health solutions in the Arctic and was selected to present her paper at the Arctic Circle in Iceland 2016.

Carol has written for the Canadian Society for Circumpolar Health newsletter “Circumpolar Health: Vanishing red willow bark in Nunavut and reindeer pasture in Norway are relevant to circumpolar health concerns, responses, innovation and potential collaboration” and presented in the competitive new category Innovations in Communicating Antarctic Science at the SCAR Open Science Conference in New Zealand, 2014. Carol lectured on her Antarctic clean up experience and contrasted the Antarctic Treaty and the Svalbard Treaty while on a Clean Up Svalbard project in September 2015. She has created a database and map of Antarctic place names named for or after women and presented a prototype map at the SCAR History, Humanities & Social Sciences Workshop in Colorado, 2015 and at the SCAR meeting in Malaysia 2016. The map was exhibited in Antarctic Footprints, University of Wollongong 2019. Her marine plastic sciart exhibit Aquamess from garbage collected in Svalbard is exhibited at the Canada Science and Technology Museum Ottawa and was part of a group show at the New York Hall of Science 2016. Carol did a TEDxMontrealWomen talk on polar pollution and solutions in 2017.

Memberships include APECS, Canadian Society for Circumpolar Health, Society of Women Geographers, and The Explorers Club.

Research projects / interests:

• Exploration and geopolitics in the polar regions
• Cultural history in the polar regions
• Antarctic environment and protection
• Circumpolar health
• Global health
• Antarctic history
• Pollution in the polar regions
• Science communication
• Antarctic cultural history mapping