Announcing Dr. Kelsey Leonard as a 2022 Jarislowsky Fellow

We are delighted to welcome the University of Waterloo’s own Dr. Kelsey Leonard as a 2022 Jarislowsky Fellow for Water in the World: Knowledge, Ethics and Practice.

Dr. Kelsey Leonard is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environment and a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability. She received an BA in Sociology and Anthropology with honors from Harvard University, a MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford, a JD from Duquesne University, and PhD in Political Science from McMaster University. She has been recognized as a 30 under 30 world environmental leader by the North American Association for Environmental Education and a “Native American 40 Under 40” award recipient by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development. Her doctoral dissertation examined Indigenous water governance in the Great Lakes.

For her research, she was also awarded one of the most prestigious postdoctoral awards in Canada, the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for water governance and sustainable oceans. In collaboration with a global team of water law scholars, Dr. Leonard has published in Lewis and Clark Law Review on Indigenous Water Justice and the defining international legal principle of self-determination under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

We are very much looking forward to learning from Dr. Leonard in the Winter 2022 term.