SOCIOS INSTITUCIONALES Y EQUIPO DE INVESTIGACIÓN

Brian Leung

Focus: Ecology and the Natural Environment

Brian Leung is an associate professor in the Department of Biology and in the McGill School of Environment at McGill University. His research focuses on 1) large-scale ecological predictions, and 2) environmental decision-making. He is now focusing on the development of PRISM as a concrete tool for forecasting, evidence-based decision making, education and outreach geared towards sustainability. He is also director of the McGill-STRI Neotropical Environment Option.

Nilson Ariel Espino, obtuvo su licenciatura en arquitectura de la Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua (Panamá), una maestría en planeamiento urbano de la Universidad de Arizona (EEUU) y un doctorado en antropología social y cultural de Rice University (EEUU). Desde el año 2004, dirige la firma de arquitectura y urbanismo Suma Arquitectos. Actualmente, es profesor adjunto de la Escuela de Urbanismo de la Universidad de McGill (Montreal, Canadá) y director del Foro y observatorio urbano de Panamá, con sede en la Universidad Católica. Ariel es miembro del Instituto Estadounidense de Urbanistas.

Contacto: naespino@grupo-suma.com

Nilson Ariel Espino, obtuvo su licenciatura en arquitectura de la Universidad Católica Santa María La Antigua (Panamá), una maestría en planeamiento urbano de la Universidad de Arizona (EEUU) y un doctorado en antropología social y cultural de Rice University (EEUU). Desde el año 2004, dirige la firma de arquitectura y urbanismo Suma Arquitectos. Actualmente, es profesor adjunto de la Escuela de Urbanismo de la Universidad de McGill (Montreal, Canadá) y director del Foro y observatorio urbano de Panamá, con sede en la Universidad Católica. Ariel es miembro del Instituto Estadounidense de Urbanistas.

Contacto: naespino@grupo-suma.com

Dr. Chantelle Richmond is a First Nation scholar trained primarily in health geography. She is deeply concerned with the current health and social inequalities endured by Indigenous Canadians, and the contributions of environmental change to these realities. Her research draws from various methods to examine the social and environmental determinants of Indigenous health, and to better understand the dimensions linking health and place among Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world. She is interested in the ways that social, environmental, economic and political processes – broadly defined – work to affect the environments within which Indigenous peoples live, in particular aiming to understand how these environments shape access to, and the quality of, social determinants of Indigenous health.

Contact: chantelle.richmond@uwo.ca

Dr. Fikret Berkes is Distinguished Professorat the Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Community-based Resource Management. He completed his BSc and PhD at McGill University, Montreal. His research in the area of interrelated and interconnected human-environment systems (or social-ecological systems) deals with commons theory, resilience and traditional ecological knowledge. He has led a number of projects in Canada and internationally. He has participated in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the UNDP Equator Initiative in conservation-development, and IPBES, the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Dr. Berkes has authored some 200 peer-reviewed journal papers and chapters and nine books, including Sacred Ecology (Routledge, 2012), Adaptive Co-Management (with Armitage and Doubleday, University of British Columbia Press, 2007) and Navigating Social-Ecological Systems (with Colding and Folke, Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Contact: fikret.berkes@umanitoba.ca

Dr. Heather MacLean is an environmental engineer whose expertise is in the development and application of life cycle-based approaches for the techno-economic and environmental evaluation of energy and other infrastructure systems. Her academic training includes a joint PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Civil Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy. Dr. MacLean is a Professor of Civil Engineering, with cross-appointments to the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. Her current research is of an interdisciplinary nature and focuses on the development of sustainability assessment frameworks and their application to the energy sector, with particular applications to biofuels, bioelectricity and unconventional fossil fuels and their end-use in light-duty vehicles and aircraft. Over the last 15 years Dr. MacLean has worked closely with the automotive, oil, electricity and bioenergy industries as well as Federal and provincial/state governments. She has served on industry and government advisory committees in both Canada and the U.S. Dr. MacLean has published more than 60 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and was recently awarded the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Excellence in Education Award for the Promotion of Sustainable Practices and previously, the Government of Ontario’s Early Researcher Award for her research on bioenergy systems.

Contact: heatherl.maclean@utoronto.ca

Dr. Mark CJ Stoddart is a Sociologist specializing in environmental sociology, social movements, and communications and culture. He completed his PhD from UBC in 2008, and held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dalhousie University in 2009-2010, before joining the Department of Sociology at Memorial University in 2010. His ongoing research includes two major lines of inquiry. First, he is examining the ways in which nature-oriented tourism reshapes social-environmental relationships with coastal environments in Atlantic Canada. Second, he is carrying out work on the ways in which Canadian national news media represent climate policy debate.  Dr. Stoddart has published a book with UBC Press, Making Meaning out of Mountains: The Political Ecology of Skiing. He has also published several journal articles and book chapters, including articles in the journals Organization & Environment, Human Ecology Review, Local Environment, Nature & Culture, Sociological Spectrum, and the Canadian Journal of Sociology. He was recently awarded the 2014 Early Investigator Award by the Canadian Sociological Association.

Contact: mstoddart@mun.ca 

Dr. Sally Aitken is a Professor in the Department of Forest Sciences and Director of the Centre for Forest Conservation Genetics at the University of British Columbia. Her work is motivated by a need to understand the capacity of tree populations to adapt to or tolerate a wide range of environmental conditions, particularly rapidly changing climates, and to translate that knowledge into better forest management practices.

Dr. Aitken completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and was a faculty member at Oregon State University prior to joining the Faculty of Forestry at UBC. She teaches forest biology, conservation genetics, and an alpine ecology field course, and is involved in forest genetic conservation initiatives in North America and Europe. Dr. Aitken received the Canadian Forestry Scientific Achievement Award from the Canadian Institute of Forestry in 2009, the UBC Killam Teaching Award in 2010, and will receive the International Union of Forest Research Organization’s Scientific Achievement Award in 2014. She recently co-authored the conservation genetics text Conservation and the Genetics of Populations (with Fred Allendorf and Gordon Luikart).

Dr. Aitken is Leader of the AdapTree Project, a large-scale multi-institutional research project investigating the genomic basis of genetic adaptation of tree populations to climate, to evaluate their capacity to adapt to new climates, and to develop policy recommendations to assist the adaptation of forests to new environments. She is currently a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC (2014-15). While at the Institute, she is exploring broader interdisciplinary questions relating to human management of natural ecosystems that are being rapidly modified by climate change, and factors that influence the willingness of governments, organizations, and individuals to pursue adaptation and mitigation strategies. 

Contact: sally.aitken@ubc.ca