McGill University
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

Below is a small selection of faculty that conduct sustainability research (see uploaded file for full list):

Faculty of Science
Dr. Elena Bennett (Dept. Biology) is a Professor at McGill and Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Sustainability Science. She is co-chair of the international Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society and Founding Director of ResNet, a pan-Canadian network to improve management of working landscapes for the provision of multiple ecosystem services. In 2016, she was named one of six NSERC Steacie Fellows. In 2020, she was a Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, indicating a citation rate in the top 1% in her field.

Dr. Catherine Potvin (Dept. Biology) is a Canada Research Chair in Climate Change Mitigation and Tropical Forest (Tier 1). Dr. Potvin’s lab focuses on four main research areas: biodiversity and ecosystem functioning livelihoods; empowerment and biodiversity; REDD+: carbon and co-benefits; and science to inform climate change policy. During her career she has edited two books and published more than 100 scientific journal articles or book chapters. Dr. Potvin served as Panama’s negotiator of REDD in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (2005-2009). She also led the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, an initiative that mobilizes scholars from across Canada to propose a blueprint for Canada’s transition to a low carbon economy.

Dr. Andrew Gonzalez (Dept. Biology) is Liber Ero Chair in Biodiversity He is the founding director of the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science and co-Chair of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Major research interests include: 1) impacts of human-caused global change on biodiversity and ecosystems; 2) rapid evolution; 3) theories explaining the maintenance and loss of biodiversity; 4) the application of network science to the design of connected landscapes.

Dr. Andrew Hendry (Redpath Museum/ Dept. Biology) is Canada Research Chair in Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics. He investigates evolutionary forces that influence the evolution of biological diversity, focusing specifically on how differences in natural selection lead to dynamic adaptive divergence and speciation. His empirical work focuses on salmon, Trinidadian guppies, three-spine stickleback, and Darwin’s finches of the Galapagos. He is particularly well known for having shown how species can evolve rapidly when they colonize new environments.

Dr. Irene Gregory-Eaves (Dept. Biology) is Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Ecology and Global Change and studies the impact of climatic and anthropogenic change on species dynamics. Her lab’s long term research goals are to make essential progress in our understanding of the structure and functioning of lakes and to quantify how these ecosystems have responded to the accelerated rate of change introduced by human activities over the Anthropocene.

Dr. Nigel Roulet, (Dept. Geography), is a James McGill Professor of Biogeosciences and Director of the Global Environmental and Climate Change Research Centre. His primary interests are on the interactions among climate, hydrology, and ecosystem structure and function that determine the biogeochemistry of the gaseous exchanges between ecosystems and the atmosphere and the lateral water exchanges between ecosystems within catchments. His ecosystems of interest are primarily forests, peatlands and shallow lakes, and the ecoclimatic regions he is most interested in are boreal, subarctic and Arctic. He approaches his research by combining empirical studies from the scale of individual plants to landscapes such as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, with a theoretical approach using simulation.

Dr. Sarah Turner (Dept. Geography) performs research in the following areas: Development geography; Southeast Asian geographies; upland minorities in peninsula Southeast Asia and southwest China; Hanoi street vendors and informal sector workers; Eastern Indonesia entrepreneurs; livelihood studies; everyday politics and resistance; commodity chain approaches; agrarian change; and innovative qualitative methods. Her research strives to anchor development thinking and practice in the day-to-day realities and aspirations of local people who often find it difficult to ‘have a voice’ given their own political, cultural or economic positions.

Faculty of Arts
Several members of the Faculty of Arts contribute to sustainability research, especially related to Indigenous studies.

Specifically, Dr. Jessica Coon (Dept. of Linguistics) is Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages and she co-leads the Montreal Underdocumented Languages Linguistics Lab. She has also had the opportunity to work with Mi’gmaq, an Algonquian language of eastern Canada. In addition to theoretical work on these languages, she has worked to build collaborations with the communities of speakers who are working to document, promote, and revitalize these languages.

Dr. Colin Scott (Dept. of Anthropology) performs research that tracks the evolution of indigenous land and sea rights, as state governments, metropolitan developers and indigenous peoples make competing claims for ownership and jurisdiction. He is the Principal Investigator of INSTEAD - Indigenous Stewardship of the Environment and Alternative Development.

Faculty of Education
Dr. Blane Harvey (Dept. of Integrated Studies in Education) is a William Dawson Scholar and oversees the Leadership & Learning for Sustainability Lab. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across the social and natural sciences on the themes of learning, environmental change and sustainable development. He studies how climate change knowledge is produced, validated and communicated, and how facilitated learning and knowledge sharing can support action on climate change. He is interested in how processes such as social learning and knowledge co-production can support collaborations that span epistemic and disciplinary divides.

Faculty of Law
Prof. Yaëll Emerich holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Transsystemic Property and Sustainable Communities. Her interests include all facets of private and comparative law, legal theory, and the relationship between law and language. As a specialist in comparative and transsystemic property law, she teaches mainly Property Law and Secured Transactions, and is especially interested in the interplay between property law and major social issues, including environmental issues.

Max Bell School of Public Policy
Dr. Nii Addy is Associate Director (Africa Outreach)/Senior Outreach Advisor in the office of the Deputy Provost, Student Life and Learning (DPSLL) at McGill University. In this role, he develops, manages, and assesses cross-sector partnerships, training and applied research supporting McGill Mastercard Foundation (MCF) Scholars’ transitions from academic studies to entrepreneurship and employment for impact in Africa. Dr. Addy also teaches at the Max Bell School of Public Policy and in the African Studies Program. His interdisciplinary work focuses on institutional change in multi-stakeholder partnerships across societal sectors (businesses, public agencies, and civil society organizations) and industrial sectors (education, agriculture, nutrition, health, etc.).

Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Dr. Treena Wasonti:io Delormier (School of Human Nutrition) is Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Food Security and Associate Director of the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition & Environment (CINE). Her research focuses on the food, nutrition and the of Indigenous peoples. She is involved in health promotion interventions that address the social determinants of health underlying the health inequities Indigenous Populations experience, particularly in a historical context of colonialism.

Dr. Niladri Basu (Natural Resource Sciences/ School of Human Nutrition) is Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Environmental Health Sciences. The goal of Dr. Basu's research is to design, validate, and apply innovative and sustainable approaches to address the most pressing societal concerns over toxic chemicals in our environment. His research is multidisciplinary (bridges environmental quality and human health), inter-sectoral (most projects driven by stakeholder needs, notably government and communities), and driven by environmental justice concerns.

Faculty of Engineering
Dr. Nathalie Tufenkji (Dept. Chemical Engineering), Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) In Biocolloids and Surfaces studies microbial or particle transport and attachment to surfaces to understand how colloid or biocolloid attachment to sediment grains predict the contamination potential of waterborne microbial pathogens or anthropogenic materials in the natural aquatic environment. Dr. Tufenkji also serves as Associate Director of the Brace Center for Water Resources Management at McGill and has co-chaired several major international conferences. In 2020, she received a Killam Research Fellowship and the Environment Division Research and Development Dima Award from the Chemical Institute of Canada. The same year, Dr. Tufenkji was elected to the Canadian Academy of Engineering and received the Award for the Support of Women in the Engineering Profession by Engineers Canada.

Dr. Susan Gaskin (Dept. Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics). Environmental hydraulics and water resources is Dr. Gaskin's specialty. Her teaching includes open channel flow, hydraulics, river engineering and water sustainability. Her research is in the general area of environmental fluid mechanics and water resources management. Specifically looking at topics in experimental fluid mechanics: effect of ambient turbulence on turbulent jets, hydraulics of hydropower, river engineering, sediment transport and fluvial erosion of cohesive sediment, and in water resources management: sustainable water supply management, basin wide hydrologic modeling and potable water quality.

Dr. Roussos Dimitrakopoulos (Dept. of Mining Engineering), Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Mineral Resource Development and Optimization Under Uncertainty, considers risk quantification and management in mine planning, design, and production scheduling, based on his framework of stochastic (uncertainty-based) mine planning optimization, from the strategic level to the operational.

1. The initial list was submitted to me by the McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative in 2020. It was list of all MSSI members and included their research interests, website, and SDGs related to their work.

2. A second list was submitted to me by a colleague in the Office of the Vice-Principal (Research and Innovation). She ran a list of sustainability keywords against a database of project titles of funded academic faculty members. I reviewed each entry in this list and removed the names of those whose research was not sustainability-focused, which I determined by reading online descriptions of their research interests.

3. I then added the names and research interests of all faculty members of TISED, the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design.

4. I reviewed the research interests of all faculty members belonging to academic units offering environmental and sustainability-focused courses and programs.

5. Noticing that there was a dearth of researchers from the Faculty of Arts in the current list, I scoured the research biographies of those faculty members belonging to sustainability-focused centres.

6. I then reviewed the list of active Canada Research Chairs, looking for those whose research pertained to sustainability. I went through this list manually, reading the CRC descriptions and determined which ones I deemed to be most relevant to the topic.

7. Cassandra Lamontagne, Concordia University, reviewed the list of researchers as part of her overall review of the STARS submission in 2020. I followed her suggestions by reviewing and refining the list even further and by providing a rationale for the inclusion for most of the researchers.

The final list is therefore a compilation of researchers who self-identify as sustainability researchers (e.g., MSSI and TISED members) and those chosen by matching keywords to their published research interests. While I have attempted to be as thorough as possible, I will no doubt have missed some researchers in my inventory. My selection of researchers rests on my understanding of "sustainability-focused"; in general, I was looking for at least 2 keywords pertaining to sustainability while I was reading researcher biographies. The list includes academic faculty members who were employed at McGill from 2018 to present.

Please note that I have included only the names of tenure-stream academic faculty (professors, assistant professors, associate professors) as this data is more readily available and reliable.

Faculty members from the field of medicine are likely under-represented as I excluded researchers working on specific illnesses (cancer, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer's Disease, dementia, depression, etc.). Even though medical research is widely applicable to sustainability concerns, it was difficult for me to determine which should be classified as "sustainability focused." I felt that including any researcher working on these illnesses might artificially inflate our numbers.

The McGill-affiliated hospitals are listed as separate research units within the university's organizational chart. I have merged the 5 hospital-based units into the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, given that McGill-affiliated hospitals are outside the administrative boundaries defined in PRE-4. I have also merged the specialized surgery and oncology units into one unit each to simplify the overall department count.