People

Lab Director

Dr. Kathryn (Katie) Plaisance serves as Principal Investigator and Lab Director of the CoLaboratory (aka CoLab). She is Professor and Associate Director of Knowledge Integration, housed in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability (SERS) at the University of Waterloo, with cross-appointments to Philosophy and Psychology. Originally trained as a philosopher of science, Katie studies, fosters, and engages in collaboration across disciplines.

Katie received her B.Sc. in molecular biology and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2000 and earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Minnesota in 2006. She went on to work as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and Ethics of Science at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany, before coming to Canada in 2009 to join the Knowledge Integration (KI) Program. Katie has played a pivotal role in helping to establish KI, an interdisciplinary honors degree that teaches students how to be critical thinkers, real-world problem solvers, and effective collaborators.

Katie’s research examines the nature of interdisciplinary collaboration, with an emphasis on facilitating knowledge exchange between philosophy of science and scientific domains. Her work uses philosophical and empirical research methods and has been published in diverse venues such as Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Psychology, Behavior Genetics, Learning and Motivation, and Scientometrics.

Katie has played an active role in building interdisciplinary networks. She co-founded the International Network for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE) and UWaterloo’s Community of Practice on Collaboration and Teamwork, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Science of Team Science (SciTS) association.

Katie teaches students how to “make collaboration work” and offers workshops for instructors who wish to improve their students’ collaboration skills. She has won several prestigious teaching awards in recognition of her teaching excellence, innovative pedagogy, and educational leadership.

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo

Project: Engaging Science with Philosophy

Dr. Sara Doody is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Collaboratory. Her research explores written communication practices in inter/transdisciplinary research contexts and how such teams navigate writing conventions when working across disciplines. She is especially interested in the kinds of tensions, contestations, and added demands that arise when disciplinary writing traditions interact.

Sara has a B.A. and M.A. in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies from Carleton University and earned her Ph.D. in Education from McGill University in 2020, where she explored writing practices and assumptions in interdisciplinary life sciences doctoral programs.

Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Southern Indiana

Project: Engaging Science with Philosophy

Dr. Gonnerman is collaborating with the CoLab team as part of the project, “Engaging Science with Philosophy” (2021-26). He is helping to develop a survey of scientists and engineers that will examine their views about the relevance of philosophy of science to their work.

Professor, Social Development Studies, University of Waterloo

Projects: SoTL and Collaborative Mindset

Dr. Logel collaborates with Dr. Plaisance on projects concerning the scholarship of teaching and learning and CoLab’s “Collaborative Mindset” project.

Professor, Sociology, Michigan State University

Project: Engaging Science with Philosophy

Dr. McCright’s scholarly research agenda aims to enhance our sociological understanding of how scientific and technological developments, top-down and bottom-up political processes, and enduring social structures influence societal capacity for recognizing and dealing with environmental impacts, technological risks, and public health risks. Over his career, he has published 2 books, about a dozen chapters in edited books, and over 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He was named a 2007 Kavli Frontiers Fellow in the National Academy of Sciences, he served as a 2008-2009 Lilly Teaching Fellow at MSU, and he received the 2009 Teacher-Scholar Award and the 2009 Curricular Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Award at MSU.