Lindsay Laird

Education

Lindsay Laird was educated at Worcester Grammar School for girls and at Newnham College, Cambridge where she not only read Natural Science (Zoology) but also played squash for Cambridge, gaining a half-blue. During her time at Cambridge a brown hairy moth from Borneo (Dasychira lairdi) was named after her. After graduation in 1971, an Atlantic Salmon Trust scholarship took her to Sutherland in the far north of Scotland to study the wild salmon of the River Brora, which was followed by Ph.D. studies on salmon and trout in North Wales under the supervision of Dr Jack Jones of Liverpool University. Her work on salmon continued at Liverpool University where she obtained her Ph.D.in 1974 with her thesis Growth and Movements of Juvenile Atlantic Salmon & Brown Trout in AfonMynach.

Career

Laird began her career in 1975 at the University of Stirling Aquatic Pathobiology Unit, on a Shell Fellowship. She also published key papers on basic techniques now considered routine: freeze branding of juvenile salmon, and benzocaine as a fish anaesthetic. The following year she obtained Nuffield Foundation funding for a project at Aberdeen University on methods of inducing auto-immune rejection of fish gonads.

She applied her fundamental knowledge of life cycles of salmon to the developing aquaculture industry in Scotland and Norway which at that time was struggling with problems of control of sexual maturation in salmon. She conducted in Norway the first experiments on autoimmune sterilization of salmon by injection. She foresaw the need to control of the life cycle of salmon in captivity in order to make production more predictable and also more profitable.

After she defined the standards for Organic Farmed Salmon (together with K. McCallum of Orkney Salmon), her concept of a green label for farmed salmon to provide quality assurance for customers was taken up by firms such as Marks & Spencer.

In 1988 she became a Teaching fellow and Aquaculture Development Officer at the University of Aberdeen, where she developed the Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech.) in Aquaculture, jointly run with the Scottish Agricultural College. She joined the Scottish Fisheries Committee the next year, monitoring effects of the electricity industry on salmon and other fisheries, and was also invited by Shetland Salmon Farming Association to advise on the Braer oil pollution spill.

She was invited to join the Scottish Salmon Strategy Task Force in 1995, and in 1998 became Vice-President of the Scottish Executive Fisheries Committee.

Beyond Scotland, from 1992 she was involved in EU education and training programmes FORCE, COMETT, ERASMUS and LEONARDO. Between 1992 and 1997 she spent periods of time at the Danum Valley Research Centre, Sabah, funded by the Royal Society and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and on aquaculture and fisheries projects in Sarawak, Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore. In 1994 she worked in the Kola Peninsula, Russia, journeying across the tundra near Murmansk in Russian ex-military helicopters to report on salmon fishing for the British Council. In 1997 she was UK delegate on the EU ALFA project, visiting fish farms in Chile.

Lindsay Laird died from cancer in 2001. Her name was given to the Lindsay Laird Innovation in Aquaculture Award, inaugurated in 2008.

Books

Laird co-edited Salmon and Trout Farming (1988) and co-wrote Handbook of Salmon Farming (2002). She also translated Aquaculture Volumes 1 & 2 (1990) and Carp Biology and Farming from the original French.

Board memberships and directorships

1992: Fellowship, Institute of Fisheries Management, (Training Committee)

1992: Director of AquaTT, Irish Aquaculture Training Partnership

1993: Board of Directors, Lakeland Marine Farm Ltd

1994-2000: Board member of European Aquaculture Society (EAS)

1997-2001: Board member, AMC Ltd. Ireland

1998: first Chairman, Organic Fish Producers Association

Honours

Selected research publications

Editorial and translations