Profiles

Paivi Abernethy focuses primarily on various aspects in intersections of health, climate change, cumulative impacts of resource extraction, toxicology, water, food systems, and increasing community resilience. She is especially interested in children’s environmental health (life course approach to chronic disease prevention) and studying health-centered environmental co-governance – particularly in Indigenous communities.

Jean Andrey's research is concerned with the implications of climate change for transportation infrastructure and operations. The core of her research focuses on risk estimation and vulnerability assessment. Over time, she begun to focus more on sustainability issues and on the challenge of creating transportation systems, and indeed cities, that are both safe and environmentally sustainable.

Derek Armitage studies the human dimensions of environmental change (local to global) and emerging forms of environmental governance. His research interests include management and governance of aquatic systems (coastal-marine and freshwater), human dimensions of environmental change, social-ecological systems, and resilience.

Steven Bednarski's research interests include ​medieval history, social history, criminal history, gender history, and environmental history.

Peter Berry actively participates with Canadian and international researchers in efforts to better understand climate change risks to health and well-being and to prepare individuals, communities and health systems for future impacts. 

Joel Blit's research interests are in international trade, economics of innovation, multinational corporations, boundaries of the firm, institutions, green patents, and carbon pricing systems (tax, cap and trade).

Dillion Browne's research interests are in the influence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), trauma, and socioeconomic status on human development; the development, evaluation, and implementation of evidence-based interventions for children and whole families who are struggling with mental health and developmental challenges, particularly in settings of trauma and adversity; migrant and refugee mental health. 

Zahid Butt's research interests focus on syndemics of infectious diseases, infectious disease epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, global health, big data analytics, and public health informatics.

Dipanjan Basu is a geotechnical engineer with diverse interest in mechanics, mathematics, numerical methods, renewable energy, and sustainability. His current research focus is on geothermal energy, soil structure interaction, life cycle assessment, and pile foundations. 

Marta Berbés-Blázquez is part of the University of Waterloo's Future Cities, a highly transdisciplinary initiative to imagine and co-create resilient urban futures in Canada. She brings strength and interests in environmental justice, resilience thinking, participatory action research, and foresight methods. 

Jennifer Clary-Lemon is interested in the areas of writing theory and pedagogy, material rhetorics, environmental rhetorics, methods and methodology, and rhetorics of location and place. Her current research examines infrastructural entanglements of humans and nonhumans as material rhetorical arguments, focusing on the Species at Risk Act and mandated recovery strategies for listed species.

Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger's focus is on international law and governance related to climate change adaptation, mitigation and finance, natural resources, investment, trade and the green economy, among other sustainable development challenges.

Rodrigo Costa’s research investigates how communities' physical, economic, and social systems interact to create disaster risk and exacerbate socioeconomic and racial inequalities.

James Craig's research focuses on the development and application of improved methods for modeling surface water, groundwater, heat transport, discontinuous permafrost, and the surface water / groundwater interface.

Peter Crank's research seeks to address questions of modelling urban spaces to understand the impact urban climate mitigation strategies have on the thermal environment as well as on all facets of human health (from physical heat stress to psychological disorders). His research team uses physical and applied climatology skills, data analytics, computer science, and instrumentation to study the impacts of a changing climate on individuals and the local environment.

​Simon Dalby's research interests are in environmental security, climate change, geopolitics, global security, and political economy.

Peter Deadman's research focus is on land use change, agent based models, wetland vegetation models, climate change impacts on water resources, enterprise GIS, and geodatabase design.

Brent Doberstein's research interests include environmental and resource management in developing countries, hazard mitigation and disaster risk reduction, climate change/hazards connections, and institutional capacity building.

Warren Dodd's research interests are in social and ecological determinants of global health and development, migration and health, community food security, healthcare and social service access, and climate change and health.

Michael Drescher’s research interests include the social psychology of private landowner conservation behaviours, socio-economic drivers of land use change, natural and cultural heritage landscape planning, environmental justice and equity, institutional analysis of green-blue infrastructure approaches, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and urban ecology.

Susan Elliott's research interests are environment and health, the global environment, urban social geography, and philosophy and method in the social sciences.

Monica Emelko's research interests include water treatment, wildfire, water quality, pathogens, climate change, filtration, land disturbance, environmental and water resources, water and land management, nanoparticle removal during drinking water and wastewater treatment, quantitative microbial risk assessment, water protection and smart infrastructure.

Elizabeth English focuses are amphibious architecture, sustainable flood mitigation, climate change adaptation, flood-resilient housing for indigenous populations and vulnerable low-income communities, historic structures and traditional cultures, community resilience and resilience metrics, wind effects on buildings, hurricane damage prevention, adaptive flood risk reduction, disaster management and relief.

Blair Feltmate's research is about identifying the additive value of sustainable development on an industry-specific basis and establishing a practical, meaningful and cost-effective climate change adaptation program for Canada.

Dustin Garrick has expertise in water and environmental governance with a focus on property rights, institutions and markets. He has twenty years of experience in environmental management with a focus on markets and governance innovations to address resource scarcity and sustainability challenges. 

Bryan Grimwood's research is focused on tourism and Indigenous Peoples, tourism ethics and responsibility, northern landscapes, and outdoor experiential education.

Roberto Guglielmi's research addresses problems in control and optimization of large-scale dynamics, described by ordinary or partial differential systems of evolution, with applications to the optimization of utility distribution over networks, heat transfer phenomena in the presence of crack and fractures, control of epidemics, reinforcement learning methods.

Daniel Henstra's focuses are public administration, public policy, local government, federalism and multilevel governance, emergency management, and climate change adaptation.

Götz Hoeppe's research interests include anthropology of science, technology and digital media, environmental anthropology; ethnography, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and responsible research and innovation.

Thomas Homer-Dixon studies the complex threats to global security, causes of violent conflict, climate change, energy science, and public policy, sources of societal innovation, and modelling of ideological change.

Craig Janes' research interests include human-environment interactions, social inequities and health, global health governance, and maternal and child health.

​Peter Johnson's focuses are the Geoweb, open data, mobile technology, public participation GIS, community-based geomatics, and geospatial technology in planning and government.

Allison Kelly studies the roles of shame, self-criticism, and self-compassion in the development, maintenance, and remission of psychopathology, especially eating disorders; Interventions and therapist behaviours that can reduce shame and self-criticism, and increase self-compassion; Fears of self-compassion and outward compassion, and how best to target these barriers in people with eating disorders; The social contexts that facilitate versus undermine self-compassion, compassion for others, healthy body image, and intuitive eating.

Luna Khirfan's research interests are community climate change adaptation, urban design and place making, international development and comparative planning, participatory planning, historic preservation and cultural resource management, and museum studies.

Sharon Kirkpatrick studies nutrition,food policy, the environmental sustainability of current eating patterns, food environments, and food access among marginalized populations.

Brendon Larson's research interests are rethinking the conservation of biodiversity in the context of global change, social dimensions of biodiversity conservation, and metaphor, environmental science and society.

Kelsey Leonard's research is concerned with ocean policy, water policy, earth law, Indigenous law, Indigenous climate change policy, Indigenous data sovereignty and ocean/coastal/marine participatory mapping.

Alana Lund studies the mechanics and dynamics of civil structures, with a focus on vibration-based techniques for structural identification. Through her research program she strives to develop robust approaches to structural health monitoring that can achieve a holistic, regional assessment of structural condition. Her research interests include structural health monitoring, vibration-based identification, uncertainty quantification, Bayesian inference, information fusion, and vulnerability and risk assessment.

​Robert McLeman's areas of research include human dimensions of environmental change, with particular attention to the relationship between environment and human migration, rural adaptation to climatic variability and change, and fostering citizen participation in environmental science.

Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher's areas of research include science communication (especially online), environmental communication (especially related to disaster or risk society), risk communication (especially related to nuclear energy generation), and citizen science.

Colleen Mercer Clarke's research includes coastal governance, landscape architecture, land use planning, coastal climate change impacts, and climate change adaptation.

Brian Mills' areas of research are transportation, road safety, construction, weather-related injury risk, and social and economic valuation of meteorological products and services.

Carrie Mitchell's research interests include climate change and cities, gendered effects of urban services provision, and resilience theory and its application in urban planning.

Hannah Tait Neufeld's research interests include Indigenous health and wellbeing, social and ecological determinants influencing maternal and child health, along with Indigenous food environments globally. 

Jozef Nissimov's research interests include virus ecology, comparative genomics of aquatic viruses, host-virus infection dynamics, microalgal biology and physiology, biological oceanography, effects of environmental change on aquatic viruses, algal-virus interactions and co-evolution, costs and mechanisms of virus resistance in microalgae, and development of new host-virus model systems.

Gennaro Notomista's main research interests lie at the intersection of design and control of robotic systems for long-duration autonomy with applications to environmental monitoring.

Dawn Parker studies the modelling land-use, transportation, and environmental interactions. Her research explores planning for sustainable cities. Her research interests include planning sustainable cities, residential land markets, agent-based modeling, and complexity theory. 

Fereidoun Rezanezhad research investigates the effects of ongoing and future climate and land use changes and management practices on the fate of carbon, nutrients and contaminants, as well as on biogeochemical fluxes between the atmosphere, hydrosphere and geosphere.

Derek Robinson's research interests include land-use and land-cover change, land-management and the carbon cycle, land grabs, land policy, agent-based modelling and geographical information systems.

Horatiu Rus studies international trade, environmental and natural resource economics, international development, and political economy.

Michelle Rutty's research interests include tourism, environment and sustainability, understanding the decision-making process and behavioural response of tourists to environmental change, assessing climate change risks and opportunities for tourism operators and destinations, and developing solutions to build a more environmentally sustainable tourism sector.

Vanessa Schweizer's research focuses are cross-disciplinary knowledge integration and the design of scenarios for the human dimensions of large-scale environmental change; long-term decision-making such as forecasting and discontinuities; and the influence of occupational, interpersonal, and cultural conflicts on climate change attitudes.

Daniel Scott's focuses are climate change and tourism/recreation, sustainable tourism, climate change impacts and adaptation, as well as climate change and protected areas management.

Mark Seasons looks at urban and regional planning, strategic planning, policy and program evaluation, local economic development, and public administration.

Simron Singh conducts socio-metabolic research on small islands. As an industrial ecologist, he tracks material and energy flows through island systems: what and how much resources are locally produced, imported, transformed, used, stocked and discarded. His research aims to inform science and policy on ways small islands can achieve resource and energy security, meet social and economic goals while building resilient infrastructure to endure climate change.

Kelly Skinner's research interests include community-based health and social projects related to food, nutrition, food security, and the broader context of food systems and environments. 

Larry Swatuk looks at the ​political ecology of natural resources governance and management, with a particular focus on water in Africa.

Pejoohan Tavassoti’s research focuses on promoting sustainability and resilience of the transportation infrastructure with a focus on an enhanced pavement engineering, design, and materials characterization framework.

Solomon Tesfamariam's research focuses on the sustainable design of tall-timber building, decision-making tools for infrastructure (asset) management and the management of civil infrastructure systems and risk-based aging infrastructure management (buried pipes, buildings, bridges, etc.).

Jason Thistlethwaite looks at innovative strategies designed to reduce the economic impacts of extreme weather and climate change within the financial sector.

Philippe Van Cappellen’s research focuses on the biogeochemistry of soils, sediments and aquatic ecosystems, the cycles of water, carbon, nutrients and metals, global change, geobiology, chemical hydrology, water-rock interactions and environmental modeling.

Johanna Wandel's research focuses are adaptation to climate change and community-based vulnerability assessments.

Olaf Weber looks at environmental and sustainable finance with a focus on sustainable credit risk management, socially responsible investment, social banking and the link between sustainability and financial performance of enterprises.

Byron Williston's focuses are environmental philosophy, the ethics of climate change and political philosophy.

Jeffrey Wilson's areas of research include economic and sustainability research, natural capital accounting, wellbeing research, indicator development, ecosystem goods and services valuation, and strategy and policy development for sustainability transitions.

Tony Wirjanto's research focuses on the intersection between statistics and econometrics. This includes financial time series with a focus on volatility modeling/forecasting and financial risk management and financial mathematics with a focus on portfolio optimization in a high-dimensional setting and on global climate change risks.

Clarence Woudsma's focuses are climate change policy, emissions forecasting, impacts of climate change adaptations on freight, regulatory policy, urban freight planning, freight and land use (accessibility), transportation demand management and deregulation of transportation provision.

Seth takes an interdisciplinary approach to research on climate change mitigation. He uses a variety of methods including surveys, randomized controlled trials, carbon accounting, and interviews, with a focus on quantitative methods. His past work examined public and expert perceptions of climate change and assessed the effectiveness of various policies in reducing transportation emissions. Looking ahead, Seth aims to provide actionable insights that enhance climate policies by making them more effective, popular, and equitable.

Steven B. Young studies sustainable materials management, life-cycle assessment (LCA) and enterprise carbon management.