Cathryn Clarke Murray

Adjunct Professor

Bio

Dr. Cathryn Murray is a Research Scientist with the Ecosystem Stressors Program in Fisheries and Oceans Canada. She formerly served as Visiting Scientist with the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) on project ADRIFT (Assessing Debris-Related Impact From Tsunami). She is also Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Murray is a marine ecologist broadly interested in the interaction between human and natural systems. She holds a PhD in biological oceanography from the University of British Columbia and a Master’s of Science degree from James Cook University in Australia. She has conducted interdisciplinary research on a broad range of topics, from the ecology of invasive species, to ecological risk assessment, cumulative effects assessment, and ecosystem-based management.

Laura Morillas

Contact Details

Research Interests

Bio

My main scientific interest is to study water resources in water-limited ecosystems and how climate change can affect water dynamics and water availability in those areas. Because evapotranspiration is the main component of the water balance under water limited conditions, during my PhD my main research objective was to develop regional evapotranspiration models specifically designed for semiarid conditions to achieve an accurate methodology to quantify evapotranspiration at regional scale. Working with physical models forced me to understand those factors controlling the evapotranspiration, and how those factors will be be affected by climate change. To validate evapotranspiration models I learnt and used the Eddy Covariance technique, the most extended methodology to measure CO₂, evapotranspiration and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. After my PhD I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico (US) where I studied the consequences regarding to water resources of widespread piñon mortality events affecting large areas of piñon-juniper woodlands in the Southwestern US. Our results showed that those regional scale tree mortality events can increase the temperature and aridity of those already water stressed areas, with large potential impacts for water dynamics and availability. At UBC I have joined an international project called FuturAgua, focused on the characterization of water resources in a drought-affected area of Costa Rica, Nicoya peninsula, and the development of resilience strategies to drought in a dynamic social-ecological system. Particularly my participation in the project will be focused in improving our understanding of water dynamics in the area and developing a hydrological model to predict the response of local water resources to predicted climatic scenarios. I am very interested in the practical and social aspects of this project, in which research will be applied from the characterization of current water resources to the development of management strategies to improve resilience of this agricultural-based social-ecological system in order to respond in a time matter to predicted future water scarcity.

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Featured Publications

William Cheung

Director & Professor, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries
RMES graduate program alumnus

Bio

William Cheung is appointed in IoF, not at IRES, and instead is a Faculty Associate of our unit. He may supervise students in our RES graduate program.

http://oceans.ubc.ca/william-cheung/

Christian Beaudrie

Adjunct Professor

Contact Details

Research Interests

Bio

Christian Beaudrie is a Decision Analyst with Compass Resource Management in Vancouver, BC. He specializes in risk and decision analysis, Structured Decision Making (SDM), risk governance, and stakeholder engagement, particularly in fields related to emerging technologies, pollution and toxics, climate change, and environmental management. His work focuses on the development of decision support tools and adaptive management programs, analytics and modelling, and the use of expert judgment elicitation techniques to help municipal, provincial, and federal governments make informed decisions towards reducing health and environmental risk.
Christian’s research explores life-cycle risks and regulation for emerging technologies, alternative (non-animal) test strategies for assessing chemical and nanomaterial risks, strategies for assessment and communication of sea-level rise and coastal flood risks, expert and lay perceptions of risk, and the use of expert judgment in decision making under high uncertainty. Christian holds an interdisciplinary PhD from the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC, an MEng in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University, and a BASc in Biochemical and Environmental Engineering and BSc in Biology from the University of Western Ontario.

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Lisa Powell

Contact Details

Research Interests

Bio

Lisa J. Powell is a postdoctoral researcher jointly appointed in the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia and the Department of Geography at the University of the Fraser Valley. She works with the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm and the Agriburban Research Centre. She completed a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies and Sustainability from the University of Texas at Austin, M.S. in mathematics from Vanderbilt University, and B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University. Her work focuses on conflicts and negotiations over agricultural land use; agriburbia; food systems and policy; natural resource extraction and transport (coal, oil); and cultural meanings and interpretations of foods, including pumpkins.

Email: lisa.powell@ubc.ca

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Michele Koppes

Associate Professor, Department of Geography

Contact Details

http://blogs.ubc.ca/koppes/ http://www.geog.ubc.ca/persons/michele-koppes/

Bio

Michele Koppes is appointed in Geography, not at IRES, and instead is a Faculty Associate of our unit. She may supervise students in our RES graduate program.

http://www.geog.ubc.ca/persons/michele-koppes/

http://blogs.ubc.ca/koppes/

Jordi Honey-Rosés

Honorary Research Associate

Research Interests

experiments, public space, urban, water

Bio

Dr. Jordi Honey-Rosés is an honorary Research Associate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES). He is an environmental planner (University of Illinois, PhD) specialized in urban experimentation and impact evaluation. Currently, his primary affiliation is at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) as a Senior Researcher. He joined ICTA-UAB after eight years at the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia (2013-2021). He has published widely on urban experiments and impact evaluation in leading international scientific journals and his teaching has been recognized with the prestigious Killam Teaching Award of the University of British Columbia. He has university degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master in Public Policy (MPP) from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Arvind Saraswat

Adjunct Professor

Bio

Arvind works as the Head of Air Quality Section (Assessments) at the BC Ministry of Environment and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. In his current role at the Ministry of Environment, Arvind leads the section responsible for the review of air discharge applications under the Environmental Management Act (EMA) and the Environmental Assessment Act (EAA), and is also a statutory decision maker under EMA. Arvind’s team is responsible for making recommendations on permitting of air discharges, publishing regional air quality reports, leading airshed planning activities and issuing air quality advisories. In his previous role as the Head of Environmental Management Section (Omineca-Peace), Arvind led regional permitting and compliance activities for oil and gas, forest and municipal sectors.

Arvind is a professional engineer with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India and a PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Studies from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Arvind’s research interests include modeling small-area variations in concentrations of urban air pollutants, development of novel methods for estimating population exposure and air quality impact assessment for major industrial sources. Arvind has published his research in important scientific journals like Environmental Science and Technology and Transportation Research Part-F.

Shashi Enarth

Adjunct Professor

Contact Details

Research Interests

Bio

Shashi Enarth is a development activist from India, struggling to strike a balance between academia and praxis. Starting his career as a community organizer, he has worked with low income segments of the population, particularly with farming communities in India, Nigeria and Tanzania. His area of interest is: building community-based self-governing people’s institutions that can safeguard the interests of its members through sustainable and equitable use of all forms of capital, especially natural and human resources. A good part of his 25 year development career saw him struggle with implementation of development policies that mandated decentralization of fiscal, administrative and political powers against a backdrop of a political economy that is shaped by traditional institutions and forces of centralization. In the process, he got involved in policy research and advocacy initiatives through NGOs in India and as a consultant to The World Bank in Africa. His current research interests, therefore, focusses on understanding barriers to equity and sustainability in the geo-political context of developing economies. Before taking the current sabbatical, he was a senior member of BASIX Social Enterprise Group, an Indian conglomeration of 15 organizations working on a mission to promote large scale sustainable livelihoods.

Shashi is a trained social worker who returned to school to do a PhD that explored the relationship between the processes of decentralization and democratization and its impact on good governance. He is an IRES/UBC Alumni, during the days of RMES!

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Alexa Tanner

PhD with Stephanie Chang, 2022
Grants and Contracts Manager

Contact Details

LinkedIn
Twitter
alexa.tanner@gmail.com

Research Interests

Environment, Policy and Decision-making, Resilience

Bio

Alexa was a PhD student studying how people perceive and make decisions pertaining to natural disaster risk, supervised by Dr. Stephanie Chang. Her work addresses the social aspects of natural disasters with an emphasis on earthquakes and flooding.

As a member of MEOPAR’s Maritime Transportation Disruption project, she studyied risk perceptions of the marine transportation system at the organizational level, looking at both system resilience and vulnerabilities.

Reach her at:
LinkedIn, Twitter and alexa.tanner@gmail.com