Dawn Parker is a Professor in the School of Planning, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, Canada. She has ben 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.
She received her BA in economics from Lewis and Clark College and her PhD in agricultural and resource economics from University of California - Davis. She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in modelling with Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University. Previously to joining UWaterloo, she was a founding member of the Center for Social Complexity and Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University, U.S.A., where she served as director for the PhD program in computational social science. She is a fellow of the Global Land Project, serves on the editorial board of Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling and on the advisory board of the Network for Computational Modeling in Social and Ecological Sciences.