Profiles

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.

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.

Liane Gabora is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on how the creative process works, and the role of creativity and innovation in cultural evolution, using both experimental studies with humans and computational models.

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

Laurette Dubé holds the James McGill Chair of consumer and lifestyle psychology and marketing at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and is the founding chair and scientific director of the McGill Centre for the Convergence of Health and Economics (MCCHE).

Raja Sengupta's research projects follow three distinct but complementary paths that fall under the broad umbrella of GIScience: agent-based models, spatial tools to measure anthropogenic impacts, and methodological improvements to existing GIScience tools.  Within GIScience, the use of agent-based mo

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.

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.

James Shelley is the Knowledge Mobilization Coordinator at the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing and a Research Project Coordinator in the Office of the Dean at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Western University. In addition, he serves as Knowledge Mobilization Coordinator in the Department of Geography and Environment in the Faculty of Social Science.

Madhur Anand is professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph. She is an internationally recognized ecologist with research interests ranging from theoretical to empirical studies of natural and human-induced changes in ecosystems at regional and global scales and their implications for sustainability.

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.

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.

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

Thomas Homer-Dixon, WICI founding director, is now the Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, and a University Research Chair in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Canada.

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.

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.

Stephen Quilley is an Associate Professor of social and environmental innovation in the Department of Environment and Resource Studies in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo.

Mary I. O'Connor is an Associate Professor in the Zoology Department and Associate Director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. O'Connor is a leader in metabolic ecology research, using experiments, data synthesis and theoretical models to understand change in aquatic ecosystems, including causes and consequences of biodiversity change and climate change impacts.

Paul Thagard is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of many interdisciplinary books. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, where he founded and directed the Cognitive Science Program. He is a graduate of the Universities of Saskatchewan, Cambridge, Toronto (PhD in philosophy) and Michigan (MS in computer science). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science.

Frances Westley is JW McConnell Chair in Social Innovation at University of Waterloo, where she heads up Social Innovation Generation (SiG), a national initiative designed to build capacity for social innovation in Canada.

Roger White is Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and since 2007 has also been affiliated with the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) in Mol, Belgium.