Faculty Affiliate Members

GIER is an institutional network linking faculty from all colleges at the University of Guelph: The Ontario Veterinary College, the Ontario Agricultural College, the College of Arts, the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, the College of Biological Sciences, and the Lang School of Business and Economics.

These are our Faculty Affiliate Members from across campus and their areas of expertise within environmental research.

We invite you to learn more about them by clicking on their name!

To search names and keywords, you can use ‘Command/Control + F’

Aaron Berg

Hydrology, remote sensing, soils, soil moisture

Abdallah Elsayed

Materials for contaminant removal, characterization, mechanical behaviour of polymers for remediation, detection of contaminants

Ajay Heble

Improvisation, human rights, pedagogy

Alex Smith

Biodiversity, neotropical, insect, elevation, forestry, entomology, arthropod, ecology, evolution, climate

Alfons Weersink

Agricultural economy, new technology, farm-level practices, agricultural and environmental policy

Allan Willms

Climate modelling, dynamical systems, mathematical biology

Amanda Boetzkes

Contemporary art history and theory, aesthetics and ethics of art, ecology, global systems of waste, energy use, political ecologies, climate change, Circumpolar North

Amar Mohanty

Biocarbon innovation, bioplastics, pyrolysis of agricultural, forestry and food residues, surface engineering and filler-matrix adhesion, compatibilization, injection moulding, 3D printing, reactive extrusion, compostability, recycle plastic waste utilization, value added coproducts and byproducts

Amir Aliabadi

Atmospheric sciences, air quality, thermal comfort, thermo-fluids, urban environment, energy systems, turbulent flows, computational fluid dynamics, experimental thermo-fluids, weather prediction and forecasting

Amy Greer

Disease ecology, host-pathogen interactions, disease dynamics, waterborne diseases, disease transmission, population ecology, population dynamics

Amy Newman

Wildlife, early-life stress, ecophysiology, local adaptation, environmental stress, microbiome, urbanization, agriculture

Andrea Bradford

Hydroecology and ecological flows, wetland and stream restoration, rainwater management, low impact development, water resources policy

Andreas Heyland

Life history theory, life history evolution, development, evolution, aquatic sciences, toxicology, transgenerational plasticity, physiology, microalgae, aquaculture

Andrew Binns

Rivers and streams, fluvial hydraulics, urban and rural hydrology, sediment transport, river morphodynamics, urban flood hazard, basement flooding, contaminant transport

Andrew Papadopoulos

Environmental public health, built environment, healthy public policy, public health intervention planning and evaluation

Andrew Young

Diptera, entomology, biodiversity, taxonomy, phylogenetics, systematics, genomics, pollination, Syrphidae (Flower flies), community science

Asim Biswas

Sustainable soil management, soil physics, precision agriculture, proximal soil sensing, digital soil mapping, data driven agriculture, information -based soil management, soil sensors, greenhouse gas emission

Ayesha Ali

Multivariate statistics, graphical Markov models, ecological networks, bootstrap, survival statistics, machine learning

Beth Parker

Groundwater, aquifers, aquitards, source water protection, sustainable water supplies, soil and groundwater contaminant transport and assimilation, high resolution monitoring, process-based characterization, land disposal of wastes and nutrient cycling, climate and land use change influences on water budgets/systems

Beren Robinson

Animal behaviour, flexible animals, changing environments, complex environments, evolution, aquatic ecosystems, fish

Bill Van Heyst

Air purification system, air pollution control device, photocatalyst, ammonia, size fractionated particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, emission factors, emission inventories, air dispersion modelling, poultry

Brandon Gilroyed

Anaerobic digestion, waste valorization, bioenergy, agriculture, biomass, sustainability, fermentation, pretreatment, biotechnology, livestock mortality management

Brian Husband

Conservation biology, biological diversity, plants evolutionary ecology, hybridization, gene flow, population genetics, introduced – native species interactions, pollination

Brittany Luby

Anishinaabe Aki, Canadian Subarctic, boreal forest, industrialization, Anishinaabe survivance, crop restoration, food sovereignty, land sharing/Treaty relationships

Bruce McAdams

Restaurant food waste, sustainability in food-service, sustainable employment models in restaurants

Catherine Bush

Climate fiction as creative practice, ecological fiction, human/animal/more-than-human relations, climate imagination, land-based writing, literatures of the Anthropocene

Claire Jardine

Wildlife health, ecosystem health, ecology of diseases, rodent and vector borne zoonotic diseases

Claudia Wagner-Riddle

Greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture, soil health, soil ecosystem services, carbon footprint, crop rotations, soil nitrous oxide emissions, state-of-the-art soil lysimeters, micrometeorological techniques

Craig Johnson

Institutions, environmental governance, urbanization, livelihoods, climate change, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia

Daniel Ashlock

Ecological models, artificial intelligence, game theory, bioinformatics

Daniel Gillis

Ecological & public health risk assessment, statistical methods, bridging the digital divide, community-engaged software design, transdisciplinary pedagogy

Darren Robinson

Herbicide persistence and fate in soil, integrated weed management in vegetable crops, weed biology, cover crop residue management, weed-crop competitive interactions

Diane Borsato

Contemporary art and the environment, contemporary art and food, land art, outdoor art education, performance art, social practice art, naturalist cultures, environmental research creation in visual art

Elizabeth Boulding

Climate change, evolutionary rescue, molecular ecology, predator-prey responses, aquaculture genetics

Elizabeth Finnis

Agriculture and environment, food security, food sovereignty, political ecology, rural livelihoods

Elizabeth Gow

Animal migration, movement ecology, forest ecology, urban ecology, ornithology, habitat use, conservation, life history trade-offs

Elizabeth Kurucz

Relational leadership for sustainability, multi-sector collaboration, societal learning, social innovation intermediaries, sustainability design labs, sustainability transitions, education for sustainability, SMEs and sustainability, organizational change and sustainability, social-ecological resilience

Emmanuelle Arnaud

Geology and groundwater, environmental geology, glacial geology, sedimentary geology

Eric Nost

Environmental governance, ecosystem services, climate adaptation, geomatics, webmapping

Erica Pensini

Environmental engineering, soil remediation, water treatment, functional materials, emulsions, gels, colloids, polymers

Erin Nelson

Agroecology, sustainable food systems, community-engaged scholarship, knowledge networks, Latin America

Evan Fraser

Food security under economic globalization and climate change, land use change, integrated socio-economic/crop/climate modelling, farmer behaviour

Faisal Moola

Heathlands as cultural landscapes, ecology and ethnoecology of plants, environmental policy, Indigenous-led conservation

Gale Bozzo

Food waste reduction, postharvest management strategies, plant-environment interactions, plant-biotic organism interactions, specialized plant metabolism, natural products, agriculture, biochemistry, biotechnology, enzyme evolution

Gard Otis

Beekeeping development, honeybee ecology, evolution, insect behaviour, honeybee biogeography, Asian honeybees, speciation

Genevieve Ali

Ecohydrology, soil hydrology, watershed connectivity, forest and agro-ecosystems environmental modelling

Glen Van Der Kraak

Fish physiology, reproduction, endocrine disruption, toxicology, risk assessment, weight of evidence, wastewater effluents, environmental hormones

Hafiz Maherali

Plants, fungi, soil, mycorrhiza, mutualism, ecology, evolution, climate change, conservation, restoration

Hannah Tait Neufeld

Indigenous health, indigenous food systems, maternal nutrition, infant and young child feeding, diabetes prevention, food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, global health

Heather Murphy

Water/wastewater treatment, water quality, drinking water distribution, risk assessment, environmental health

Helen Hambly

Broadband network, internet infrastructure, rural and regional development, agricultural innovation systems, socio-ecological systems, capacity development, gender analysis, knowledge management and mobilization, extension studies

Jackie Cockburn

Fluvial geomorphology, ecohydrology, sediment budgets, watercourse and aquatic habitat restoration, systems undergoing change

Jackie Goordial

Environmental microbiology, cryoenvironments, permafrost, polar microbiology, marine subsurface microbiology, low energy environments, genomics, bioinformatics, astrobiology

James Harley

Soundscape composition, field recording, acoustic ecology

James Longstaffe

Environmental chemistry, natural organic matter, soil and groundwater contamination, remediation, analytical instrumentation

Jana Levison

Hydrogeology, groundwater issues, water quantity, water quality, integrated modelling, agriculture and water, climate change and water, source water protection, First Nations and water resources

Jeji Varghese

Knowledge systems engagement, socio-ecological sustainability/conservation/stewardship/governance, community-engaged scholarship/learning

Jennifer Silver

Environmental governance and resource management, environmental politics and sustainable development, digital technology and social media in environmental surveillance and communications, fisheries and coastal communities, the ‘blue economy’

Jesse Popp

Wildlife ecology, Indigenous knowledge systems, stewardship, Indigenous environmental science

Jing Lu

Environmental performance, sustainability reporting, corporate governance, sustainability accounting

John Dutcher

Sustainable nanomaterials, polysaccharides, plant-derived biopolymers, advanced microscopies, advanced spectroscopies

John Fryxell

Population dynamics, spatial dynamics, movement, food web, harvesting, anthropogenic disturbance

John Livernois

Environmental economics, natural resource economics, benefit-cost analysis

Jon Warland

Agricultural meteorology, measurement and modelling of atmospheric turbulent transport, environmental instrumentation, agricultural physics

Julie Horrocks

Environmental epidemiology, spatial statistics, spatial temporal statistics, species distribution modelling, animal abundance estimation

Justine Richardson

Arboretum, plant collections, native plants, living laboratory, outreach, education, conservation, gene banks, species-at-risk

Karina Benessaiah

Human-environment geography, sustainability transformations, urban-rural linkages, counterurbanisation, vulnerability, social-ecological crises, ecosystem services, inequality, food systems, agency, human dimensions of global change

Karl Cottenie

Community ecology, data analysis in R, metacommunity dynamics, molecular identification, spatio-temporal analysis, computational ecology, microbiome, meta-analysis

Karen Houle

Critical theory, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, ecopoetry and ecocriticism, environmental ethics, posthumanist ethics and politics, plant metaphysics and ethics, animality, philosophy of difference

Karine Gagné

Anthropology, climate change, multispecies ethnography, Buddhism, ethics of care, environmental knowledge, infrastructure, Himalayas, India, Ladakh

Kate Parizeau

Social life of waste, food waste, informal recycling, waste management policy, environmental inequality, urban political ecology

Katie Clow

Vector-borne zoonoses, epidemiology, disease ecology, One Health, invasive tick, invasive pathogen, companion animal

Kevin McCann

Mathematical theory, food webs, resilience, stability, ecosystem function, aquatic ecosystems, fisheries, climate change, global change, biotracers

Khash Ghandi

Environmentally friendly chemistry, clean energy, environmental remediation, aqueous chemistry, environmentally friendly materials chemistry, chemistry at interfaces, remote sensing, clean agriculture, free radical science, radiation science

Khurram Nadeem

Statistical inference, machine learning, ecological modelling, big data analytics, wildlife population dynamics, forest fire modeling, climate change and agricultural productivity

Kieran O’Doherty

Genomics, public deliberation, social and ethical implications, ELSI, GE3LS

Kimberly Schneider

Agro-ecology, forage crops, service crops, soil quality, water quality, nutrient use efficiency, nutrient cycling, phosphorus, carbon sequestration, biodiversity

Lawrence Hill

Creative writing, business of writing and publishing, slavery and freedom, human rights, migration, collective identity

Leanne Chen

Computational electrochemistry, density functional theory, energy storage and conversion

Lee Niel

Animal behaviour, animal welfare, environmental enrichment, human-animal relationships

Lorna Deeth

Infectious disease modelling, spatial and spatiotemporal disease analysis, environmental effect monitoring and surveillance methods, computational statistics

Madhur Anand

Sustainability science, climate change ecology, biodiversity, human-environment modelling, ecological modelling, complex system theory, ecopoetry

Manjusri Misra

Sustainable materials, nanobiocomposites, waste utilization, bioplastics, biofibres, polymer processing, additive manufacturing, polymer blends, circular economy, multilayer packaging, biodegradability

Mark Holmes

Sustainable tourism, sustainable food, and rural economic development

Mary Ruth McDonald

Sustainable vegetable production, integrated pest management, adaptation to climate change, soil phosphorous

Michael Denk

Organic and inorganic chemistry, remediation of soil and water, dehalogenation technology, chemical reduction, pesticides, heavy metals

Mike Dixon

Plant environment interactions, controlled environment, agriculture, indoor vertical farming, biological life support

Monica Cojocaru

Environmental adoption and behaviour, population health and the environment, game theory, data-driven modelling, complex dynamics of populations

Naresh Thevathasan

Perennial herbaceous and woody biomass crops, agroforestry, soil organic carbon sequestration, international development, food security, soil health

Neil Rooney

Biodiversity, ecosystem structure and function, ecosystem stability, food web ecology, limnology, sustainable agriculture, aquaculture interactions with the environment, multiple stressors, cumulative effects

Nicolas Brunet

Environmental conservation, community based monitoring, land use planning, community capacity development, natural resource governance, social studies of science, Northern Indigenous and resource based communities, research partnerships, knowledge systems

Niel Karrow

Cortisol, mycotoxin, inflammation, endotoxin, genomics, immunotoxicology, immunogenetics, thermal stress, stress resilience

Noella Gray

Marine conservation policy, marine protected areas, international conservation governance, science-policy interface, political ecology, Science and Technology Studies, geopolitics, ecotourism, collaborative qualitative methods

Olaf Berke

Public health, One Health, epidemiology, biostatistics, machine learning, spatial statistics, geographic epidemiology, disease surveillance, zoonoses, open science

Paul Sibley

Environmental toxicology, aquatic toxicology, risk assessment, risk communication, aquatic ecology, aquatic insects

Philip Loring

Sustainability, food systems, human ecology, fisheries, resilience

Prasad Daggupati

Soil Erosion, soil health, water quality, Lake Erie phosphorus, greenhouse gas emissions, best management practices, hydrological and water quality modeling, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing

Praveen Saxena

Plant adaptations to changing climates, biodiversity conservation, biology of endangered plants, light induced responses, neurotransmitters, cold stress management, drought tolerance in plants

Rafael Santos

Carbon capture, utilization and sequestration, solid waste treatment and valorization, climate change mitigation, pollution monitoring and control, soil amendments and fertilizers, applied geochemistry and mineralogy

Richard G. Zytner

Remediation, petroleum hydrocarbons, bioremediation, brownfields, modelling, treatment fresh-cut wash-water, fugitive methane gas emissions

Richard Heck

Pedology, micromorphology, soil thin sections, x-ray computed tomography, digital image processing, soil structure, soil hydromorphism, magnetic induction, magnetic susceptibitity, electrical conductivity

Robert Hanner

Biodiversity, bioinformatics, biomonitoring, biotechnology, DNA barcoding, environmental DNA, food integrity, animal and plant health

Roberta Hawkins

Feminist political ecology, ethical/sustainable consumption, digital natures, media and environment

Robin Roth

Indigenous conservation governance, conservation social science, political ecology, decolonial conservation, conservation induced livelihood change

Ross McKitrick

Environmental economics, environmental statistics, climate policy, climate data, model evaluation

Rumina Dhalla

Organizational identity, image and reputation on organizational responses, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, reputational risk, social enterprise, food insecurity and poverty, implications of diversity

Ryan Gibson

Rural development, community economic development, regional planning, governance, wealth and philanthropy, public policy

Ryan Norris

Species-at-risk, population ecology, conservation, migration, connectivity

Ryan Prosser

Environmental toxicology, ecological risk assessment, freshwater mussel conservation, pesticide toxicology, mollusk biology, soil toxicology, aquatic ecology

Sally Hickson

Renaissance art, portraits; women, art, and social networks; collecting history

Sally Humphries

Sustainable small farmer agriculture, Honduras, participatory plant breeding, gender, youth  

Sarah Adamowicz

Arctic, biodiversity, bioinformatics, DNA barcoding, freshwater, molecular evolution

Scott Krayenhoff

Urban climate, canopy micrometeorology, urban heat mitigation, pedestrian thermal comfort, climate change adaptation, land-atmosphere interaction, regional climatology, microclimate effect of urban trees, urban canopy model development

Sheri Longboat

Rural planning and development, rural studies, water security and governance, Indigenous peoples, capacity building, community-based approaches

Shoshanah Jacobs

Ocean monitoring, seabird biology, ecology, knowledge transfer, biomimetics, science communication

Silvia Sarapura

Gender planning in agri-food systems, gender transformative change, farmer led research, indigenous food systems, integrated seed systems, international research for development, gender and intersectionality in agri-food systems

Stefan Kremer

Deep-learning, deep belief networks, recurrent networks, spatio-temporal pattern recognition, pattern induction, bioinformatics

Stuart McCook

Agriculture and environment, agroecology, climate change, coffee, crop diseases, environmental history, global history, history of science and technology, science and technology studies, sustainability, tropical crops

Susan Chiblow

Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous law, water, reconciliation, Indigenous research methodologies, ecosystem, Indigenous Elders

Susan Glasauer

Wetlands, biogeochemistry, metals, phosphorus, bioremediation, mining, soil, microbial geochemistry, climate change

Susan Nance

Animal history, American West, Canadian West, entertainment history, rodeo, circus, dog racing, exotic animals, tourism history, performance studies

Tad McIlwraith

Indigenous peoples, Arctic Canada, Subarctic Canada, ethnography, research ethics, Knowledge Systems

Talat Genc

Energy economics, environmental economics, supply chain management, electricity markets, electricity auctions, oil markets, OPEC, capital investment, dynamic pricing, imperfect competition

Thanasis Stengos

Environmental kuznets curve, trade off between emissions and economic growth, demand for energy, alternative energy sources and economic growth

Timothy Dewhrist

Anti-consumption, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, cause-related marketing, marketing and public policy, marketing and society, public health, social marketing, sustainability, tobacco control

Tom Hsiang

Fungal ecology, forest fungi, grass fungi, fungal genome sequencing and assembly

Tongzhe Li

Experimental economics, innovation adoption, consumer behavior, green nudges, eco-labeling

Wayne Caldwell

Land use planning, agricultural land use, rural conflict resolution, local governance, healthy rural and small town communities, community based approaches to economic and environmental issues

Yiguo Sun

Non-/semiparametric estimation and hypothesis tests, non-stationary time series analysis, panel data models, spatial econometrics

Youbin Zheng

Cannabis production, controlled environment plant production, vertical farming, indoor farming, rootzone management, lighting, fertilization, irrigation, water disinfection, green roof

Ze’ev Gedalof

Biogeography, climate change, forest ecology, dendrochronology, wildfire, mountains, ecotones, paleoclimatology, geomatics

Banner photo credit: Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility

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