Meet Joanne Denny!
September 1, 2025
Tell us about your academic and professional trajectory before you joined UBC Zoology
Sure. I have a BSc in Fisheries Biology from the University of Northern British Columbia. I graduated in 1997. I also have a Master’s in Philosophy, in Forensic Genetics, from Anglia Ruskin University from 2009. After graduation from my undrgraduate degree, I worked as a Research Assistant at UNBC on population genetics of Steelhead Trout and at Oxford University on primates genetics.
I decided to stayed in the UK after my experience at Oxford University I studied, and then, worked at Anglia Ruskin University as a technician in their teaching labs, which I really liked. The job included setting up the labs for class, being responsible for running the labs, and interacting with the undergraduate students. I really liked that. We also did some trips. For example, we went to the South of England for a week and did a lot of ecology-based work. I went as the equipment specialist. The students would come to me to get equipment and then they'd go off to the field with the professors. I never expected to end up doing that. I still wanted to get into forensics, but I had decided that I wanted to move back to Canada to be closer to my family in the Yukon.
Why did you choose forensic genetics for you Master’s in Philosophy?
Anglia Ruskin University, at that time, was one of only a few places that actually offered degrees in forensic science. I was very interested in forensic science since when I graduated with my undergraduate degree. Strangely enough, the inspiration was from reading a book by Patricia Cornwall. The book is part of a series about a forensic anthropologist, a character named Kay Scarpetta, who works in the US. However, around the time I graduated, Canada was going through job freezes. I wanted to be an RCMP officer, because in Canada, you can only work in the forensic investigative unit if you are a police officer. Given the job situation in Canada, I decided to apply to the forensic department at Anglia to do a postgraduate degree. My Master’s project involved identifying bushmeat with DNA, in the context of the socioeconomic reasons behind the bushmeat trade. The university gave me funding, and the samples came from various African countries. The samples were tiny pieces of smoked meat, and were challenging to extract the DNA. This was early 2000’s when DNA extraction techniques were not as good as they currently are. I ended up focusing on mitochondrial DNA and used databases used by the police and the government to identify unknown samples.
When did you decide to return to Canada?
My husband and I made the decision to move back to Canada in 2010, and we chose Vancouver because we thought it would be the best place for both of us to get jobs at some point. Another benefit was to be close enough to my family in the Yukon, our main reason to move back. I wasn't seeing them very often and my mom was getting older. After about nine months of getting to explore Vancouver with my children, I got a job with UBC at the Centre for Molecular Medicine over at the BC Children's Hospital as part of the BC Children's Hospital Research Institute. I was the sole person who ran the Sanger Sequencing lab for that facility, as well as for some UBC researchers, and for outside companies as well. Primarily, the work was for people at the children's hospital, providing DNA sequences for whatever research they were working on, like Huntington’s disease. I worked there for four years, but I was the only person in the lab and I was very lonely. I really missed being around people. I had always been part of a team in whatever job I previously had. When my current position was posted, I decided to apply because it involved working and teaching labs again, something I had already done and liked. I was quite familiar with that type of work. In addition, I knew I'd be working with a team of people and so that was quite exciting too. I was offered the job here and I started in November 2016, and have been here ever since.
Tell us more about your job and how it has evolved
My role has evolved a little bit over time. I was hired to mainly support a course that no longer exist: BIOL 140 or Laboratory Investigations in Life Science as well as for BIOL 363 or Laboratory in Animal over the years by preparing the labs, animal care and collections and BIOL 331 or Developmental Biology. I have worked with a various EL Faculty, some of them already retired. The list includes Agnes Lacombe in BIOL 363, Kathy Nomme, Lynn Norman and Chin Sun in BIOL 140. Then Stella Lee for Bio 331 and then now Tessa Blanchard as part of 331 as she's taken over from Stella, while Stella has moved to 363. Those are the main people I've worked with over the years.
Besides course lab prepping and interactions with the undergraduate students, from time to time, myself and various colleagues collect organisms for various courses, including signal crayfish, a freshwater invertebrate species native to British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Initially, we did some exploratory trapping along the Fraser River and found that the optimal place to collect.
What other activities are you involved with at UBC?
A number of years ago, we were having lots of problems with the Botany and Zoology autoclaves. Both departments decided to implement autoclave training to all autoclave users. I was asked to do that because I'd been using autoclaves for many, many, many years since I first got my first job out of university in 1997. I had to learn a little bit more about autoclaves too. Now, I'm responsible for training people, and I have been helping out whenever there are minor fixes with the autoclaves.
In addition, for the last two years, I have been the sustainability ambassador for Zoology and Botany. I had heard about sustainability ambassadors long before I ever decided to become one. Since 1996, when I started to volunteer in a lab, I started to be concerned for the amount of waste that comes from labs: whether it is lab gloves, test tubes, pipette tips or anything else, there's a lot waste produced in a lab. Over the years, I've tried to reduce waste by reducing things where I could. Once I came here to Zoology, I started to see initiatives being run by some of the graduate students. Inspired by those initial experiences, I decided to run a pilot project in the BIOL 363 lab. The trend since then has been to expand these initiatives to include all the teaching labs as well as the research labs and to expand from lab gloves to unlabelled lab plastics. Over the last 2 years we have been able to divert about 25,000 gloves from landfill through this pilot programme. I also have received some money to start recycling unlabled plastic from labs.
Another recycling project I have been running for over a year now is the collection of refundable containers in the Biological Sciences building. The money collected with these containers is used to buy supplies for the Biological Sciences food pantry – and initiative created by Celeste Leander to support students struggling with food security. Since May 8th, 2024 until July 19th, 2025, I collected and returned 5557 containers to the Return It Express (on campus). This equates to $555.70, all of which was used to purchase food for the food pantry over the time frame mentioned above. I'm not the only one that makes the effort to donate food, other people do it all the time. I am just grateful that people in the department make real efforts to recycle their cans because they know that the money from those cans is going back to fill the food pantry.
Tell us about your favourite hobby
I started doing pottery many years ago, when I was living in England. At first, I just took a couple of courses here and there. After moving back to Canada and just before COVID, I took another class at Trout Lake, and that is when I was kind of hooked. But then, COVID hit. When studios re-opened, I signed for private lessons at a private studio, and then I became a member of that studio, and I've been there ever since. I really love the Community Clay Studio but I don't go as much as I'd like to. It's a really relaxing place for me. When I go there, I'm completely focused on just the pottery and keep trying to challenge myself, because even though I've been doing it for about six years now, I'm still not particularly good, but I really like it. Most of the stuff I do is throwing on the pottery wheel but I also do some hand building as well. When I am at the studio, often I want to just try something a little bit different, or I have like an idea in my head or I've seen something that I really like, I want to try and make it then. I really like making mugs and I have a lot of mugs right now at different stages, and a lot need to be glazed. The one thing I love about pottery is how it relaxes me, except for glazing. It might be because I really like vibrant colours and I decoration, both difficult to achieve, and that is why I have a lot that needs glazed.