Bio

Jeff is an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at IRES in Dr. Navin Ramankutty’s Land Use and Global Environment research group (co-supervised by Dr. Elena Bennett at McGill University). As a broadly trained researcher, Jeff draws from natural and social science disciplines in the pursuit of a more sustainable and just agri-food system.

While completing his MSc and PhD at Cornell University, Jeff’s research spanned dairy, grain, and fruit and vegetable systems at local, regional, and national scales. This work covered numerous topics, such as ecological weed management, forage quality trade-offs, the “conventionalization” of organic agriculture, meaningful work and well-being in agroecology, and the sociocultural and political barriers to farmer decision-making.

At IRES, Jeff is exploring how different people and places have fostered multifunctional agriculture across Canada. As one component of this research, he is using machine learning models to generate spatially explicit predictions of where farmers are most likely to cultivate an array of co-benefits from cover cropping. With a broader focus on agriculture and food system transformation, Jeff is also designing a mixed-methods approach to understand the lock-ins and path dependencies that make agri-food systems resistant to change.