Graduate Student Opportunities
Last updated on October 6, 2025
Below is a list of current graduate opportunities at the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability (SERS) for a graduate degree in Social and Ecological Sustainability and the researcher is offering the opportunity. If you don't see an opportunity, please see our faculty research interests page.
Masters or PhD
Marta Berbés - Master or PhD student for the project 'Blackwards' to the Future: Past, present, and futures of the African American community of South Phoenix, AZ Follow this link for more information and to express interest.
Blackward to the Future is a community-led, participatory action research initiative dedicated to reclaiming the past, present, and future of the African American community in Phoenix, Arizona. The project seeks to address the erasure of Black histories from the city’s cultural landscape by documenting oral histories, preserving community archives, facilitating intergenerational dialogue, and co-creating future urban visions. Drawing on the Adinkra concept of sankofa—the principle of looking to the past to move forward—the project emphasizes joy, resistance, and self-determination over damage-centered narratives.
PhD
Vanessa Schweizer - PhD student for the project Exploratory scenario analysis of marine carbon dioxide removal: Synthesizing the ocean’s environmental, legal, and technological futures Follow this link for more information and to express interest.
The objective of this project is to develop robust scenarios for the deployment of a marine-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) approach that accounts for the interaction between physical (climate and ocean), technical, and social factors. Taking an innovative two-pronged and iterative approach, the project will develop an extension for the ocean circulation model Oceananigans to explore a marine CDR method called ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE). In parallel, a novel predictive graph model will be developed based on interdisciplinary expert elicitation combining aspects of oceanography, process engineering, law, and governance. This approach allows us to couple the ocean-circulation and graph modelling results, enabling iterative refinement and interpretation of the linked models to arrive at deployment scenarios that are simultaneously technologically and politically feasible. The work’s expected significance is to provide timely guidance on near-term Canadian policy choices regarding OAE research and deployment pathways in or adjacent to Canadian waters.