Faculty

Vanessa Schweizer, PhD

Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies

Department of Knowledge Integration

Cross-appointments:

Geography and Environmental Management
School of Environment, Enterprise and Development
School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability
Systems Design Engineering

Director, Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation

Faculty, Balsillie School of International Affairs

Member, Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change (IC3)

Fellow, Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University

Contact information:

Phone: (519) 888-4567 ext. 45106
Office: Environment 1 (EV1), room 211
Email: vanessa.schweizer@uwaterloo.ca, ki.ug.associatechair@uwaterloo.ca

Degrees:

PhD Engineering and Public policy, Carnegie Mellon University, 2010
Masters Environmental Studies, The Evergreen State College, 2007
BSc (H) Physics (minors in Mathematics, Philosophy, Speech Communication), University of Nevada, USA, 2001

Research interests:

Collective decision-making. This includes many processes such as articulating aspirations and values, exercising foresight, confronting uncertainties and risks, and negotiating tradeoffs.

Active research projects:

Systematic approaches to scenario design for large-scale environmental change
Path dependencies and discontinuities in social and technological change
Interdisciplinary knowledge integration for environmental problems, especially climate change

Key publications:

Schweizer, V.J. and Kurniawan, J.H. (2016) Systematically linking qualitative elements of scenarios across levels, scales, and sectors. In press with Environmental Modelling & Software, doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.12.014
Lloyd, E.A. and Schweizer,V.J. (2014) Objectivity and a comparison of methodological scenario approaches for climate change research. Synthese, 191, 2049-2088.
Schweizer, V.J. and O’Neill B.C. (2014) Systematic construction of global socioeconomic pathways using internally consistent element combinations. Climatic Change, 122, 431-445 for the Special Issue on "A Framework for the Development of New Socioeconomic Scenarios for Climate Change Research."
Schweizer, V.J. and Kriegler, E. (2012) Improving environmental change research with systematic techniques for qualitative scenarios. Environmental Research Letters, 7, 044011.
O’Neill, B.C. and Schweizer, V. (2011) Projection and Prediction: Mapping the Road Ahead. News & Views article for Nature Climate Change, 1, 352–353.

Selected honours/awards:

Paper with E.A. Lloyd recognized with a Diamond Ranking by editors of Synthese for being one of the top 10 downloaded papers of 2014
Contributing author to Ch. 21 (Regional Context) of the contribution of Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Paper with E. Kriegler selected for the "Highlights of 2012" collection of Environmental Research Letters
Doctoral fellowships from the Link Foundation (Energy Fellow, 2008-2010) and The Henry Luce Foundation (Clare Boothe Luce Fellow, 2005-2007)