Societal and environmental systems

The Urban Resilience Lab, led by Prof. Rodrigo Costa, investigates the impacts of natural hazards on urban communities, employing computational simulations to assess the impact of earthquakes, wildfires, and floods to the built and social infrastructure, emphasizing solutions that foster equitable outcomes.

Prof. Costa's research investigates how communities' physical, economic, and social systems interact to create disaster risk and exacerbate socioeconomic and racial inequalities. Beyond academic boundaries, Rodrigo has collaborated with emergency managers, urban planners, resilience officers, and insurance companies to advance the state of knowledge in disaster risk and subsequently distill that knowledge down to decisions that foster urban resilience.

Prof. Ma's research group explores ways to enable the energy transition, whereby today's fossil fuel-based uses such as transportation and heating will be supplied by a clean electricity grid. Her group creates techno-economic models to find economically advantageous and technically feasible solutions to meet future energy needs. These models include distributed energy sources such as energy storage, smart loads, demand response, renewables, and electric vehicles in transactive electricity distribution systems in the context of Distribution System Operators (DSOs).

Lisa Aultman-Hall, PhD is Professor and Chair of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She was the founding Director of the interdisciplinary Vermont Transportation Research Center (TRC) whose focus included land use and transportation models. Prof. Aultman-Hall's most recent journal publications have focused on creating alternative specific attributes for intercity mode choice models of air versus highway travel and the associated estimation of carbon emissions per person trip and distance. She is also working on use of travel survey data to generate time and space-resolved energy demand for electric vehicle (EV) charging which is a key element of modeling regional electricity grids under different EV adoption scenarios. With collaborators in Vermont, Dr. Aultman-Hall is developing new spatial accessibility measures for intercity travel using large datasets from California.

Scott M. Campbell is a Systems Design Engineering Lecturer and Director of CSTV (Centre for Society, Technology and Values) at the University of Waterloo. His research revolves around the role of technology in Canadian society, specifically the history of computing technology and science in Canada. He is also a co-founder of the Computer Museum in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.

In 2013, Dr. Campbell published an article about the history of WATFOR, a student-oriented Fortran compiler first created by 4 undergraduates at the University of Waterloo in 1965, followed by many other educational languages and application packages. These publications helped put the University of Waterloo on the map and establish its reputation for innovation. Another recent article of Dr. Campbell’s is “Backwater Calculations for the St. Lawrence Seaway and the First Computer in Canada”, an examination of the role of electronic computing methods in the planning of the St. Lawrence Seaway, published in the Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering.

Cameron Shelley is a Lecturer in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He has held Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the Philosophy Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has taught a variety of courses including Cities, Technology & Society, Design & Society, Biotechnology & Society, Information Technology & Society, among others.

In addition to his research work, Dr. Shelley has received multiple awards such as the UWaterloo Alumni Association Gold Medal for best Ph.D. dissertation. See Dr. Shelley's Google Scholar page for a list of his publications.