Talks

Kings in the North: Great White Sharks in Canadian Waters

Sonya Lee is a Korean-Canadian producer-director and National Geographic Explorer focusing on stories that intersect science, nature, people and culture.  

Her current projects combine her love of food, Korean culture and ocean conservation with a documentary series called Our Ocean Table for TELUS Originals and a short documentary exploring the fishery behind a Korean traditional dish, produced with support from the National Geographic Society.

Her most recent film, Jawsome: Canada’s Great White Sharks, aired on CBC’s The Nature of Things and has been nominated for Best Science and Nature Documentary or Series for the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards. It is currently streaming internationally on National Geographic Disney+ and Hulu.  

With a background in marine biology and over a decade of experience in science communication, Sonya was previously a producer for the National Film Board of Canada’s Ocean School project, producing over 100 media pieces including documentaries, VR/AR experiences, and multimedia interactives. 

Dr. Heather Bowlby is a research scientist who has focused on conservation and fisheries biology for more than 20 years. Her research interests relate to how populations respond to threats, the factors that cause them to change in size, and how different types of data can be combined to generate new ecological knowledge. She has worked on numerous species in both marine and freshwater environments, primarily studying lobster, Atlantic salmon, gaspereau, and sharks.  Currently, she leads the Canadian Atlantic Shark Research Laboratory at Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, with on-going projects on blue, porbeagle, shortfin mako, basking and white sharks. She is also an adjunct professor at Dalhousie University, serves on the Marine Fishes species specialist subcommittee for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), and is the Canadian science delegate to the sharks working group at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). 

Tonya Wimmer With over 20 years' experience studying a variety of cetacean species at university, and with government, industry, and non-industry organizations, her primary focus has always been on protecting marine species and reducing impacts from human activities. To do this, she has worked side-by-side with other researchers, government, industry, First Nations, as well as within communities. Tonya strives to help MARS achieve its goal to provide effective and safe response while contributing valuable data and research to assess and mitigate the impacts from human activities to marine animals. In 2017 and 2019, she helped lead the response to, and investigation of, the mass mortalities of right whales in Eastern Canada. Tonya is a member of the Canadian Right Whale Recovery Network, a board member of the Right Whale Consortium, a Steering Committee Member for the Entanglement Working Group of the Canada-US International Advisory Committee for Right Whale Recovery and a member of the International Whaling Commission’s Stranding and Bycatch Initiatives.