Heidi Gartner joined the Royal BC Museum as the manager of the invertebrate collection in 2012, after two years of volunteer and auxiliary staff service. Heidi is an Ontario native who fell in love with the BC coast and marine biology when she moved to Victoria more than ten years ago. She obtained an MSc from the University of Victoria, with a thesis focused on patterns in community structure and invasive species distributions within subtidal invertebrate fouling communities along the BC coast.

Heidi loves exploring local intertidal and subtidal communities, appreciating BC’s amazing biodiversity while keeping an eye out for introduced species to the coast.

She is responsible for maintaining and aiding in the development of the invertebrate collection, which consists of more than 70,000 lots of specimens.