Profiles

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).

Sarah Burch is an expert in transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, innovative strategies for making progress on sustainability, and the unique contributions that small businesses can make to this solving this complex challenge.

Angela Carter's research highlights the ecological and political-economic risks of fossil fuel dependence while advancing new policy measures to wind down fossil fuel extraction and production. Working alongside a community of scholars and policy advocates, she aims to reimagine Canadian and international climate policy.

Trevor Charles' research interests include plant-microbe interactions, symbiotic nitrogen fixation, functional metagenomics, bacterial genome engineering, synthetic biology, bioplastics and bioproducts, and circular bioeconomy.

Amelia Clarke studies deep decarbonization in cities, sustainability strategies, corporate social and environment​al responsibility, collaborative strategic management, cross-sector partnerships, and youth impact.

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.

Neil Craik studies the role of procedural obligations in governance structures addressing transboundary and global commons environmental issues, the intersection of international and domestic environmental policy, climate and geoengineering governance and environmental impact assessment.

Eric Croiset's research interests include ​reaction engineering, solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), syngas/hydrogen production, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), process simulation, reactions in supercritical water, green reaction engineering, large scale optimization of energy systems, and CO2 capture from large point sources.

Tonya DelSontro’s research focus is to advance our understanding of how human activities and climate change alter aquatic carbon cycles and greenhouse gas budgets. She integrates field-based system analyses and experimental laboratory work to define and predict anthropogenic impacts on freshwater systems’ greenhouse dynamics from local and regional to global scales.

Amr ElAlfy studies deep decarbonization strategies and sustainability transitions for corporations and municipalities. He also works on Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) frameworks by utilizing various modelling and observation techniques to better understand climate patterns and their impacts on the environment and society.

​Ali Elkamel looks at process systems engineering, computer-aided product formulation and design, systems biology, carbon management, energy and environmental systems, optimization of oil, gas, petroleum refining and petrochemical operations, process modeling, and simulation and optimization of complex systems.

Christian's research focuses on metabolic engineering, systems biology, industrial bioengineering, and the circular economy. He joined the University of Waterloo from the start-up world, where he developed novel microbial pathways to vaporize waste products such as CO2, its reduced derivatives, and plastics, including the world's first bio-based glycolic acid produced from a waste stream.

Mathieu Feagan is a critical interdisciplinary scholar using the framework of ecological consciousness as different ways of knowing to build capacity for social-ecological-technological transformation. Matt works across scholar-activist-practitioner communities, connecting local action to global environmental change to support just and sustainable transitions. 

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.

Laura Hug seeks to define microbial diversity and function at contaminated sites using culture-based and culture-independent methods, generating a blueprint of which species are there and which pathways are active. Her research expands our understanding of the tree of life, while simultaneously developing solutions to address the impacts of human activities on the environment.

Joyce Kim is primarily interested in studying human-building interactions and the role of technologies to augment occupant performance and building energy efficiency. Her research leverages IoT and data-driven analytics to predict human comfort and behaviour, personalize occupant experience in the built environment and enable intelligent building design and operation. Her research interests also include smart grid technologies and utility cost optimizations.

Anna Klinkova's research interests are nanomaterials for alternative energy and catalysis, CO2 electroreduction, electroorganic CO2 fixation, and technoeconomic and environmental assessment for emerging CO2 conversion technologies.

​Hyung-Sool Lee's areas of research include production of bio-energy (electricity, H2, and CH4) and bio-chemicals from biomass including microbial electrochemical cells, wastewater treatment including nutrient recovery from organic waste and wastewater, thermodynamic/kinetic analyses of microbial metabolisms in engineered and natural systems, anaerobic membrane bioreactors including integration of anaerobic digestion with membrane separation, and anaerobic oxidation of methane, especially as part of the global carbon cycle.

Nathan Lemphers studies climate and energy governance, public policy, energy transitions, and the history of climate policy development.

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.

Juan Moreno-Cruz's research interests include energy systems, technological change, climate policy, solar and carbon geoengineering technologies, and energy transitions.

Alain-Désiré Nimubona analyzes the equilibrium relationships between polluters and their abatement equipment suppliers, which constitutes the environmental industry or eco-industry. Using economic modelling, he studies the interplay between environmental and trade policies related to the eco-industry, as well as the market structure of this industry. More recently, his research interests have widened to include issues related to the adoption of abatement technologies under uncertainty and the use of green infrastructures as a solution to sustainable development. 

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. 

Paul Parker studies renewable energy policy, sustainability, residential retrofits and carbon migration, green economy and local economic development.

Ian Rowlands areas of research include managing energy use effectively and sustainably, Ontario residential energy consumption, renewable electricity in Canada and U.S. solar energy.

Rebecca Saari's research interests include air pollution, greenhouse gases, and trade; air quality impacts and benefits under energy and climate policy; health impacts of air pollution under future climate; environmental inequality; pollution and policy impacts by income group; and integrated economic, health impact, and air quality modeling.

Steffanie Scott studies agro-food systems sustainability (organic and ecological food production and alternative food networks; urban food systems/urban food security and producer-consumer connections; sustainable diets; small producer participation in food supply chains; local food systems /local food economies; property rights, land policy, and inequalities; rural development, livelihoods, governance, and agrarian transition; campus food systems), environment-development interfaces, sustainable communities, and sustainability transitions.

David Simakov's research interests include biochemical and biomedical engineering, emerging catalytic materials for CO2 activation, nano-structure catalysts for thermo-catalytic conversion of CO2, reactor design for CO2 conversion into renewable natural gas and methanol, system design for production of renewable synthetic fuels from biogas, emerging catalytic nano-materials, heterogeneous catalysis, Green Reaction Engineering, reactor design, and renewable synthetic fuels.

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.

Imre Szeman's main areas of research are in environmental communication, energy justice, critical theory, and cultural studies.

Chao Tan areas of research are green energy, bioenergy, air pollution control, air cleaning, indoor air quality, sustainable buildings, aerosol, nanosafety, alternative fuels, energy harvesting/bio-energy, power systems, nanotechnology, renewable energy, nano-instrumentation, value-added recovery, hydrothermal conversion, hydrogen production, biomass and waste management, nanoaerosol filtration, nanoaerosol measurement, nanoaerosol generation and characterization, post-combustion air cleaning, acidic gas absorption, diesel engine emission abatement, mass, transfer between gas-liquid system, and chemical reaction kinetics.

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.

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.

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.

XiaoYu Wu’s research focuses on thermal science and explores the use of material engineering and techno-economics to develop sustainable technologies for energy conversion and chemical production.

Yimin Wu's research looks at advanced manufacturing, materials interfaces, energy materials, solar fuels, batteries, in situ multimodal characterizations, artificial intelligence, connectivity and internet of things, electronic and photonic materials, responsive materials, sensing, healthcarel, and nanotechnology.