Core Members - University of Waterloo

Sean Geobey, Director of WICI, brings expertise in social innovation theory, sustainable finance, planning, governance, and decision-theory to his research and teaching.

Dr. Chrystopher Nehaniv, Associate Director of WICI, is a professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Systems Design Departments at the University of Waterloo.

He is an accomplished senior researcher in mathematics of discrete complex systems. His research interests include Intelligent Systems and Software, Modelling, Simulation and Systems Theory.

Chris Bauch is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He studies epidemiological and ecological systems with a particular emphasis on evaluating interventions such as vaccines. He is particularly interested in coupling models of human behaviour with models of disease dynamics or ecological dynamics.

Trevor Charles is a professor of biology at the University of Waterloo. His work is in the areas of bacterial genetics and genome engineering, plant microbiome, and functional metagenomics, with an orientation towards Circular Bioeconomy applications.

Mark Crowley is an assistant professor in the Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Peter Deadman is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Waterloo. He received his PhD in 1997 from the School of Renewable Natural Resources at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Igor Grossmann (@psywisdom) is a social-cognitive scientist exploring the interplay of sociocultural factors for wise reasoning and sound judgment. His work utilizes innovative methods at the intersection of big data analytics, psychophysiology, longitudinal surveys, and behavioural experiments.

Keith Hipel is university professor of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo where he is co-ordinator of the conflict analysis group.

Sharon Kirkpatrick, PhD, is a nutritionist and professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems.

Dawn Parker is a Professor in the School of Planning, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, Canada. She has been actively involved in the development of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, serving previously as Associate Director and Director, and most recently leading efforts to develop a Canadian Network for Complex Systems. Her research focuses on the development of fine-scale models that link the drivers of land-use change and their socioeconomic and ecological impacts, with completed and ongoing projects on organic agriculture in California’s Central Valley, timber harvest and carbon sequestration in eastern deciduous forests in West Virginia, U.S.A., and the effects of HIV/AIDS on smallholder agricultural households in Uganda. Her most recent work focuses on residential landscapes, examining interactions between land markets, landscaping, and carbon sequestration in ex-urban landscapes, and modelling the co-evolution of urban transit networks and residential neighbourhoods via land and housing markets. Her areas of technical expertise include agent-based modelling, land-use and property market modelling, and environmental and resource economics.

Vanessa Schweizer is an Associate Professor in Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo. She applies approaches for understanding complex systems to socio-economic scenarios in the context of climate change. Vanessa was the Director of WICI from 2020-2023.