Yi-Shin (Grace) Chang is a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo studying Public Health with a specialization in Health Research. Her research interests are around food security policies and human nutrition, with a focus on the social determinants of health and underrepresented populations.
Aijuan Chen is currently with Strategic Policy Branch, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC). As a Policy Analyst, her research areas include organic agriculture, farm structure, farm performance, intergenerational farm transfer, and Indigenous people in Canadian agriculture sector. Prior to AAFC, she worked as an Analyst at Statistics Canada for one year, with a focus on data collection and data analysis in the Commodity Section.
Ning Dai is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo. Ning is primarily interested in the sustainable transformation of the agro-food system in China, and globally. He studies the institutional support for smallholder ecological agriculture and the sustainable innovation in food retail. Currently, his work focuses on sustainable public procurement, urban food security, and the informal food sector in Nanjing, China.
Jodi Koberinski is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment whose work explores food democracy, environmental governance, and climate breakdown. After many years of engagement as an entrepreneur, advocate, and activist in food systems transformation, Jodi was named the 2015 Oak Fellow for Human Rights due to her food sovereignty work in Canada and abroad. That semester at Colby College in the USA inspired a return to academia as a scholar-activist. Jodi’s research explores the concept of food as a commons.
Danshu Qi is a PhD candidate in Steffanie Scott’s research team at University of Waterloo. Her research is focusing on China’s ecological food systems and the social impacts on traditional small farmers. She has conducted fieldwork in Nanjing in terms of farming practices and operations of ecological farms, social relations within ecological food sectors, and the role of traditional small farmers.
Yuhui Qiao is an associate professor in the faculty of resource and environmental management at China Agricultural University. Her research focuses on organic agriculture, land ecology, and pollution studies.
Theresa Schumilas received her doctoral degree in Geography and Environmental Management in 2014. Her dissertation examined the ways in which China’s unique cultural, environmental, economic, and political context is supporting and restraining the rapid development of a variety of ‘alternative’ food provisioning networks. Her work was part of the team’s research into China’s ecological food and farming sector.
Steffanie Scott is Professor in the Department of Geography & Environmental Management in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She is past president of the Canadian Association for Food Studies, and is engaged in research on sustainable food systems in China and Canada.
Zhenzhong Si's research interests range from food security, food safety and food system sustainability to rural development in China. He got his PhD in Geography from University of Waterloo in 2015. He is currently Postdoctoral Fellow researching the Food Security Impacts of COVID-19 at Balsillie School of International Affairs
Xiaoping Sun is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Saint Mary's University.
Professor Sun's current research project, entitled “Feeding the Nation from the Wilderness: Food, Migration, and Environment on China’s Northeastern Borderland,” examines the historic transformation of Beidahuang (北大荒, the Great Northern Wilderness) from China’s largest concentration of freshwater wetlands in the late 1940s to its largest agribusiness that can feed 10% of the Chinese population in the 2000s.
Our research collaborator Hannah Wittman is a professor in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. Her research projects examine the ways that the rights to produce and consume food are contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agrarian citizenship.
Taiyang Zhong is a professor in the faculty of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences at Nanjing University. Zhong's research interests include land policy, rural geography and food studies. Zhong plays a key role in the regional studies of food security and accessibility in the city of Nanjing for the Hungry Cities Project.