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Grace Brady joined SHOAL as Data Officer in 2025. Here she looks back on her first six months working with the SHOAL core team.
If anything has guided my career thus far, it’s following the fish. Whether it be online or in the field, I want to work for the future of healthy fish populations. I thought all signs would lead to the sea, but the world has a funny way of placing you just where you belong. If I could consult a crystal ball or had even a moment of narrative foresight within my own life, the signs always pointed to freshwater.
I started university on a Classics degree, which meant quite a lot of careful pivoting was done, both academically and professionally, to end up here. I changed my degree to Sustainable Development, with a focus on sustainable fisheries management. This was primarily sparked by reading Ian Urbina’s essay collection The Outlaw Ocean, as well as the incredible work of one of my university professors, Dr. Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood. In my final undergraduate year, I was looking for more opportunities to study fish and was put in contact with a student researching invasive traits in freshwater fish. As a research assistant, I trawled through the IUCN Red List and FishBase, aggregating life history data to model species’ invasive potential. I thoroughly enjoyed this work, and this specific experience aligned quite seamlessly with the advertised Data Officer role at SHOAL.
I found out I was successful for this position on an island off the Isle of Mull that can only be accessed on foot at low tide or by boat. There was no reception at the campsite, so I bashed up a heathery hill for a crumb of 4G every few hours to check my email. At the time, I missed Georgie’s call about a verbal offer because it was low tide, and therefore the critical window of time to vacate the island that day. I accepted the position on a single-track road that bisected two sheep paddocks.
The first week at SHOAL was an absolute whirlwind. Within 48 hours in the role, I found out that I would be joining SHOAL in Abu Dhabi for the IUCN World Conservation Congress (WCC). It was exciting to know that I would meet the team in person so quickly into starting, as we work remotely. It was the first time the SHOAL core team was all in one room together!
Leading up to the WCC, my workload became dictated by a strict deadline to produce physical brochures on our work for the event. It was an intense welcome to the team, but it was also gratifying to be given a task that acquainted me with SHOAL’s work, both for specific countries and species.
After the WCC, I finally had time to settle into the role. This gave me a better sense of my week-to-week tasks, which are mainly running our 1000 Fishes and partner databases, as well as completing data pulls for the team. My first long-term project in this role is leading a Conservation Monitoring Outreach initiative for our Critically Endangered Priority Fishes. This effort aims to collect and update knowledge on whether conservation action has taken place for these Critically Endangered species. With the help of the IUCN SSC Freshwater Fish Special Group and local and regional experts, we have collected data on over 400 species thus far. It’s been a great learning experience to focus my efforts on outreach and lead a project at SHOAL. I am excited to analyse the data collected from this outreach and share the results in our annual review coming out in May.
Also, it’s been an absolute joy to use my Gen Z internet literacy to make fun social content for SHOAL as a side task. This is a consistent avenue to express creativity within the new social media strategy and contribute in a multi-faceted way to the team.
In February, I was offered more hours and an extended contract to stay with SHOAL longer than I initially expected. It is very exciting news and reassuring that I am contributing to the team as they hoped someone would in this role. I still am early in my career, and sometimes there are moments of doubt and imposter syndrome working as a data officer in the conservation sector. All I can do is accept feedback from my team to produce good work and continue learning about freshwater fishes and the data-driven tools that I can use to share their stories and inform conservation planning. I am very grateful for the kind, supportive, and knowledgeable team that I have at SHOAL, and I am overjoyed to extend my time here!
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