Kelsey Robertson

Graduate Program Manager

Pronouns: she/her

Contact Details

AERL Room 430
2202 Main Mall, The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4
Canada

kelsey.robertson@ubc.ca

Prospective students please contact admissions@ires.ubc.ca

If you wish to communicate information to our student body, please contact communications@ires.ubc.ca

Bio

Kelsey manages our graduate program, assisting current students and faculty with the following:

Primary contact for current students in navigating program milestones. The liaison between IRES and G+PS. Works closely with the RES Graduate Advisor in monitoring and advising re: student progress and satisfaction.
Oversees the work of the IRES Health & Wellbeing Resource Coordinator and champions other such initiatives on behalf of the RES Student Society.
Manages the RES admissions cycle, working with the RES Admissions Committee to review applications, make supervisory matches, finalize admissions decisions, and assign recruitment scholarships.
Alongside the RES Awards Committee, coordinates the review and adjudication of applications for UBC administered awards and forwards nominations to the Faculty of Science or G+PS as appropriate.
Responsible for administrative processes for scheduling RES graduate courses.

Daniel Steel

Associate Professor, School of Population and Public Health
Associate Member, Department of Philosophy

Website

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=gCHR8tQAAAAJ&hl=en

Bio

Dr. Steel is Associate Professor in the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics in the School of Population and Public Health. Steel is not appointed at IRES and instead is a Faculty Associate of our unit.

His research focuses on the intersection of values and science in the context of environmental and/or public health issues. Current research includes a SSHRC funded project on different concepts of diversity, and how these are relevant to explanations of how diversity can generate better science or better science-informed policy.

Dr. Steel is also the author of Philosophy and the Precautionary Principle: Science, Evidence and Environmental Policy (2015 Cambridge University Press), and is currently interested in the fair distribution of costs of precautions taken to protect public health or the environment.

More recently, he has worked on ethical issues related to the ongoing opioid crisis, including voluntary consent in clinical trials that offer access to pharmaceutical grade heroin and bias in research on and regulation of prescription opioids.

Click here for a list of recent publications.

Joanne Fitzgibbons

PhD Student

Contact Details

https://jofitzgibbons.wordpress.com/

Research Interests

Adaptation, Climate change, Cultural ecosystem services, Ecosystem services, Environment, Environmental and cultural values, Infrastructure systems, Natural hazards, Policy and Decision-making, Public policy and analysis, Resilience, Resource governance and management, Social ecological systems, Sustainability, Urban Sustainbility, Vulnerability and risk

Bio

Jo Fitzgibbons is a PhD student in CHANS Lab at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). With a background in urban planning, geography and international development, her work focuses on issues of inclusion and participation in co-creative processes surrounding sustainability and community resilience.

During her undergraduate studies, Jo gained experience facilitating community-based research both locally and abroad, on topics ranging from water quality to local economic development. These experiences sparked an interest in issues of representative politics and justice in participatory processes, which she explored further in her Honours and Masters theses. In 2019, Jo completed a Master of Environmental Studies degree in Planning at the University of Waterloo. She was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal for her research, which examined issues of justice and inclusion in the processes of planning for urban resilience.

Jo’s PhD research at UBC is funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship in Honour of Nelson Mandela. Through her research, she seeks to understand the potential for urban rewilding efforts to contribute to transformative change and social-ecological resilience. This work will build on previous work on participation and inclusion in planning by attending to questions of collaboration, justice, and multi-stakeholder governance.

Follow Jo on ResearchGate and Google Scholar.

Featured Publications

Follow Jo on ResearchGate and Google Scholar.

Taylor, Z., Fitzgibbons, J. and C. Mitchell (2020). Finding the Future in Policy Discourse: An analysis of City Resilience Plans. Regional Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2020.1760235

Fitzgibbons, J. and C. Mitchell (2019). Just urban futures? A program evaluation of justice and equity in “100 Resilient Cities”. World Development. 122. p. 648-659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.06.021

Doberstein, B., Fitzgibbons, J. & C. L. Mitchell (2018). Protect, accommodate, retreat or avoid (PARA): Canadian community options for disaster risk reduction and flood resilience. Natural Hazards. (Special Issue) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-018-3529-z

Jumi Gogoi

PhD with Dr. Navin Ramankutty, 2024
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Waterloo

Contact Details

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jumi-gogoi

Bio

Dr. Jumi Gogoi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Her interdisciplinary applied research focuses on the use of large-scale agricultural datasets, satellite imagery and machine learning methods for informing climate-smart agricultural strategies. She completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia in February 2024 under the supervision of Dr. Navin Ramankutty and Dr. Nathaniel K. Newlands (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Govt. of Canada). Her PhD research specifically focused on the application of satellite big-data and machine and deep learning methods for developing crop yield prediction models for the Canadian agricultural sector. Prior to her PhD, Jumi had an interdisciplinary academic background and has completed studies in Business Analytics (MS, University of Dallas), Economics (MSc, University of Bath) and Business (Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi).

Featured Publications

Gogoi, J., Newlands, N. K., Mehrabi, Z., Coops, N. C., & Ramankutty, N. (2023). Assessing the Performance of Satellite-Based Models for Crop Yield Estimation in the Canadian Prairies. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 49(1), 2252926. https://doi.org/10.1080/07038992.2023.2252926

Last updated September 2024.

Kushank Bajaj

Alum; PhD 2024 with Navin Ramankutty

Contact Details

bajajkushank[at]gmail.com

Bio

Kushank Bajaj was a PhD student and then a Postdoctoral Fellow at IRES. He was supervised by Prof. Navin Ramankutty. His research focused on Climate-Smart Agriculture in low-income countries, mainly in India. He is interested in questions at the intersection of food-water-energy nexus, especially ones with relevance to societal outcomes.

Kushank grew up in India where he received his B.Sc. (Hons) and M.Sc. in Earth Science. During and after his graduation, he worked with NGOs and institutes under numerous Indian government ministries. Some of the projects he undertook include-drought characterization and its drivers, resource (groundwater) vulnerability mapping of a micro-watershed using multi-criteria fuzzy logic decision making technique, water resource characterizations in different eco-systems using stable isotopes, and, enabling better decision making through past climate reconstruction and national paleoclimate database fabrication.

Sarah-Louise Ruder

PhD with Terre Satterfield & Hannah Wittman, 2024
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Ottawa
Researcher, Food and Agricultural Institute, University of the Fraser Valley

UBC Public Scholar, UBC Four Year Doctoral Fellow, SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship Recipient

Contact Details

sarah.louise.ruder@ubc.ca

sruder@uottawa.ca

Google Scholar

ResearchGate

LinkedIn

Research Interests

Food security, Gender, Perceived risk and new technology, Political ecology, Political economy, Resource governance and management, Social ecological systems, Sustainability, Technology

Bio

Sarah-Louise Ruder is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies and a Researcher at the University of the Fraser Valley in the Food and Agriculture Institute. Her interdisciplinary research and public scholarship focus on the social, political-economic, and environmental dimensions of agriculture and novel technologies in the food system.

Sarah-Louise completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability in 2023. Her supervisors were Professor Terre Satterfield and Professor Hannah Wittman. Her dissertation research investigated the evidence of surveillance capitalism in agriculture, with a policy and document analysis of farm management platforms; challenges and opportunities for data governance and data justice vis-à-vis increasing digitalization of the food system; farmer experiences and imaginaries of technological change in Canada, focusing on digital technologies; and the enactment of responsible research and innovation in the food system, with a study of agricultural genomics experts. This research was funded a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, the UBC Four Year Doctoral Fellowship, Genome BC, and the UBC Public Scholars Initiative.

While at UBC, Sarah-Louise coordinated a SSHRC Connection project with Hannah Wittman at IRES and Shauna MacKinnon at the British Columbia Agricultural Climate Adaptation Research Network (BC ACARN). Building on her community-engaged research and UBC Public Scholars project, she led the development of a an open-access “toolkit” for ethical data governance in agriculture available in multiple languages (see: https://www.bcacarn.ca/projects-2/ethical-data-governance/).

Featured Publications

Ruder, S. L., Bowness, E., McIntyre, A., Grant, A.M., & Newman, L. (2023). Tasting the ‘Future of Food’ on a Bay Area Cellular Agriculture Tour. Gastronomica, 23(2): 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2023.23.2.37

Ruder, S. L. & Kandlikar, M. (2023). Governing Gene-Edited Crops: Risks, Regulations, and Responsibilities as Perceived by Agricultural Genomics Experts in Canada. Journal for Responsible Innovation, 1(10), 1–29. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23299460.2023.2167572

Reimer, C., Ruder, S. L., Koppes, M., & Sundberg, J. (2023). A Pedagogy of Unbecoming for Geosciences Otherwise. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Special Issue: Race, Nature, and the Environment, 113(7), 1711–1727. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2151406 || Equal authors

Ruder, S. L.,* James, D.,* Bowness, E.,* Robin, T., & Dale, B. (2022). Canada’s Corporate Food Regime and the Prospects for a Just Transition. In J. Antony, W. Antony, & L. Samuelson (Eds.), Power and Resistance: Critical Thinking about Canadian Social Issues. Fernwood. https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/power-and-resistance-7th-ed || *Co-Lead authors

Clapp, J. & Ruder, S. L. (2020). Precision Technologies for Agriculture: Digital Farming, Gene-Edited Crops, and the Politics of Sustainability. Global Environmental Politics, 20(3), 49–69. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00566 Ruder, S. L. & Sanniti, S.R. (2019). Transcending Learned Ignorance of Predatory Ontologies: research agenda for an ecofeminist-informed Ecological Economics. Sustainability, 11(5), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00566 || Equal authors

Last updated: May 21, 2024

Kyoko Adachi

MA Student

Contact Details

Research Interests

Behavioral change, Climate change, Environmental and cultural values

Bio

I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and came to Canada for my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. I majored in Environmental Ethics and double minored in History and Anthropology there. Currently at IRES, I am working with Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi and Dr. Jiaying Zhao on people’s sense of responsibility for intergenerational transfers including climate impacts. Outside school, I enjoy swimming, volleyball, piano, and exploring different brunch places.

Projects

Courses

Featured Publications

Annegaaike Leopold

Adjunct Professor

Contact Details

aleopold@calidrisenvironment.com

Bio

Annegaaike Leopold Msc, has joined the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, working as Co-PI with Dr. Gunilla Oberg, on a research program aimed at building transparency into the regulatory process of risk assessment and management of organic chemicals, specifically in the face of scientific controversies. This builds seamlessly on her background as EUROTOX registered applied environmental toxicologist with 30 years of experience in the field of regulatory ecotoxicology and environmental fate. Over the past 20 years she has focused on endocrine ecotoxicology, evaluating effects of potential endocrine disruptors in birds and amphibians as well as fish. Working on the hazard and risk assessment of potentially endocrine disruptive chemicals, has allowed her to work closely with scientists representing different opinions in the scientific debate on endocrine disruptors. This has led her to science for policy research program she currently working on at EGESTA. As President of the European branch of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), she is also contributing to shaping the future of science and risk communication of environmental research in SETAC.

A significant portion of career Annegaaike has worked as an executive manager in the contract laboratory world. This has allowed her to develop skills as project manager, working in a planned and systematic way, directing and executing business development, expanding and deepening client relationships, leading and developing multidisciplinary teams. She is also a keen scientific organiser of workshops and conferences on cutting edge environmental topics. Annegaaike had an international childhood and she is bilingual (Dutch-English).

Narayan Gopinathan

MSc Student

Contact Details

narayansgopi@gmail.com

phone: 8584494482

Research Interests

Climate change, Energy

Bio

Originally from San Diego, California, Narayan graduated with his BS in environmental economics and policy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016. During his undergraduate studies, he completed research internships at the University of California, San Diego, blueEnergy (an NGO that does water and sanitation work in Nicaragua), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the California Environmental Protection Agency. He has also published peer-reviewed work in Climate Policy, on the political economy of mid-century strategies for decarbonization.

He is currently pursuing his masters’ degree in IRES under the supervision of Milind Kandlikar. For his thesis, he is comparing the life-cycle greenhouse gas footprint of conventional and electric cars in the context of India’s coal fired power grid.

Projects

Courses

Featured Publications

Rapichan Phurisamban

(they/them or she/her)

PhD Candidate, Vanier Scholar, Public Scholar, 2023 IBioS Student Fellow

Contact Details

rapichan.phurisamban@ires.ubc.ca

Research Interests

Biodiversity conservation, Environmental and cultural values, Management of biodiversity, Policy and Decision-making, Political ecology, Resource governance and management, Science-policy interface, Water governance

Bio

Returning to UBC where I received a bachelor’s degree in economics, I find the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES) to be an intellectual home for problem-based, interdisciplinary researchers with deep social and ecological concerns. I started my PhD journey in the fall of 2019, working under the supervision of Dr. Terre Satterfield. My current project draws on political ontology, decolonial studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic methods to study river relations, lived realities of river dwellers, and knowledge politics in Mekong River science-policy-management interfaces. I’m interested in understanding the conditions for which the Mekong River is recognized as a living being, and how locally representative ways of knowing and living with the river can inform our terms of engagement beyond modern freshwater and biodiversity governance. To this end, I have been working with riparian community members on a Mekong River and Fish Monitoring Project.

Prior to my journey back to academia, I was a researcher and water policy analyst at the Pacific Institute in California. I have worked on topics including water rights and access, cost evaluations of water supply and demand management options, drought impacts on agriculture and salmon fisheries, and water infrastructures and public health. I hold a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialized master’s degree in human geography from the University of Zurich, where I studied the use of local ecological knowledge (LEK) and downstream communities’ response to impacts from large-scale Mekong River development.

Outside of work, you can find me hiking, rock climbing, sketching/painting, and trying out new vegan recipes.

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rapichan-Phurisamban