Neha Sharma-Mascarenhas

PhD Candidate, SSHRC Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholar, UBC Sustainability Scholar, Four Year Doctoral Fellow

Contact Details

neha.sharma@ires.ubc.ca

https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/sharma-mascarenhas-neha

Research Interests

Community-based research, Data science, Economic evaluation/analysis, Environment, Public policy and analysis, Sustainability

Bio

Neha is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her doctoral research attempts to understand the socio-economic, policy and industrial dynamics that mediate repair and reuse within a zero waste and circular economy context. Her doctoral work at IRES is supervised by Professor Milind Kandlikar.

Neha has worked for over a decade at the nexus of economic and public policy research and data analytics with international research organizations and corporations in India. Prior to starting her PhD program, she worked with World Resources Institute (WRI) on developing a resilient growth strategy for Karnataka based on a comprehensive regional economic analysis. In the past, she has worked on building and implementing econometric models across research and analytics divisions of various organizations. She has also been involved in research projects at some of the Indian academic institutes and public policy think-tanks on issues of urban livelihoods and governance.

In Vancouver, parallel to her research, Neha has been engaged in a project to develop a regional pathway for transition to a circular economy through collaboration between government, communities, and enterprises. She has also conducted quantitative and qualitative studies with the city’s transit agencies and the local government for advancing sustainable transportation in the region.

Neha holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune. Her Master’s thesis was a survey-based study on designing a social security scheme for domestic workers in Pune. She completed her Honours Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Hindu College, University of Delhi.

LinkedIn | Google Scholar | ResearchGate

Justin Ritchie

Adjunct Professor

Research Interests

Climate change, Energy, Energy policy

Bio

Justin Ritchie is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. His work on climate change and energy technologies, policies and economics has been published in an array of peer-reviewed journals that include Environmental Research Letters, Energy, Energy Economics, and beyond.

Evelyn Arriagada

PhD Student

Contact Details

ekarriagada@gmail.com

Research Interests

Community-based research, Gender, Human right to water, Participatory action research, Water governance, Water security

Bio

Evelyn Arriagada is a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (UBC), supervised by Professor Leila Harris. At UBC, she is a member of EDGES Research Collaborative (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity and Sustainability).

Her research interests include subjective experiences of environmental suffering, collective action, and political linkages, and gender-environment relationships in territorial conflicts. Her PhD thesis will be focused on women’s activism in water struggles in Chile. Following a Feminist Political Ecology approach, she wants to understand potential shifts in personal identities, gender dynamics, and relationships with water that women experiment through the process of becoming activists. Her Ph.D. program is supported by the Chilean Commission of Science and Technology by its scholarship program “Becas Chile”, as well as a supplementary scholarship from the Diego Portales University (Chile).

Evelyn is an anthropologist and MA in social sciences, both from the Universidad of Chile and also MA in Political and Social Sciences, from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). Before joining IRES, she has worked as an Assistant Professor and Academic Coordinator at the Sociology Department of the Diego Portales University. Since 2016, she has led the Territorial and Environmental Inequalities Research Programme in the Observatory of Social Inequalities at that university, in which she has researched, taught, and worked with non-academic organizations about different environmental conflicts in Chile.

Jackie Lerner

Adjunct Professor

Contact Details

Research Interests

Bio

Jackie Lerner is an impact assessment specialist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Jackie has been an environmental consulting professional for over 20 years. Her experience includes environmental and social impact assessment of major resource developments across Canada and internationally: primarily mining, oil and gas, and infrastructure projects. Jackie holds a PhD from the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at UBC. Her academic research focuses on methodologies for creating future development scenarios in cumulative effects assessment as well as practicable approaches for incorporating gender-based analysis into impact assessment. She is also broadly interested in innovation in assessment processes, and how the processes themselves might be improved as tools for public participation in decision-making. Jackie has presented evidence to the Senate Standing Committee on Energy and the Environment in their review of Canada’s Impact Assessment Act and serves on the practitioner’s focus group assisting British Columbia’s Environmental Assessment Office in developing guidance to support the new provincial Environmental Assessment Act.

Projects

Courses

Featured Publications

Lucy Rodina

Adjunct Professor

Contact Details

l.rodina[at]alumni.ubc.ca

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/lucyrodina https://twitter.com/lucyrodina

Bio

Dr. Lucy Rodina has over 10 years of experience leading policy research, analysis, and development related to water resilience and environmental sustainability, including federal government experience at Infrastructure Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada in strategic and evidence-based policy. Dr. Rodina is a leading expert on water resilience, having published some of the first comprehensive studies in this area. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in environmental sustainability, and is an Adjunct Professor at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. In her government role, she has worked on policy and program design, including strategic planning for investments in water infrastructure and natural infrastructure, and the creation of the Canada Water Agency. Her research areas of work include water policy, climate change adaptation, environment and sustainability, policy innovation, and data-driven policy. Dr. Rodina has given numerous conference and invited talks, and has published on a range of topics in academic journals and other media, including peer-reviewed articles on water resilience, environmental justice, water as a human right, access to water for marginalized communities, and transformative change in social-ecological systems.

Nivretta Thatra

Communications Manager

Contact Details

AERL Building (Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory), Room 432
2202 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

nivretta[dot]thatra[at]ubc[dot]ca

thatniv.com

Bio

Nivi is a communicator with a scientific sense of curiosity. After 10 years as a neuroscientist, Nivi now broadens the reach of academic research at IRES by writing, posting, and sharing the unit’s interdisciplinary efforts towards a more sustainable future.

Communicates our research, events, and other updates internally, to other UBC units, to academics outside of UBC and to the public
- Connect with us via Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook & LinkedIn!
- press releases
- placement of op-eds and other media pieces
Oversees the Communications and Administrative Assistant
- listservs for job opportunities, internal & external events
- IRES newsletter
Supports our unit members’ communication needs: writing lay-abstracts, style guides for social media and presentations, updating IRES webpage profiles, tips on speaking to media, training on maintaining a digital presence
General website maintenance

Verena Rossa-Roccor

PhD Student, CIHR Doctoral Scholar, Public Scholar, Four Year Fellowship Recipient

Contact Details

verena.rossa-roccor@ubc.ca

https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/rossa-roccor-verena

Research Interests

Environment, Policy and Decision-making, Public policy and analysis, Science-policy interface, Sustainability

Bio

After a very brief stint as a student of political science many years ago, Verena switched careers, went to medical school, and worked as a psychiatrist in Switzerland for several years. Her passion for policy and politics never ceased, however, and Verena became increasingly frustrated with the limited impact she had as a clinician on the systemic issues that made her patients sick. She therefore made the decision to leave her clinical career path and came to Canada to complete an MSc in Population and Public Health at UBC. There, she became interested in how the framing of environmental policy as a human health issue may open up pathways for academic environmental advocacy. Fast forward another few years and Verena, now a PhD student at IRES, explores ways in which academics conduct knowledge-to-action activities in the environmental policy realm. Drawing on a wide range of literatures from policy theory over moral psychology to social movement scholarship, Verena asks the question how we can more effectively use the extant evidence on the health impact of environmental issues to drive policy change. Spoiler alert: simple dissemination of knowledge – no matter how well communicated – is not enough; the world of policy making is so much more complicated! Conversely, strategies such as ‘activism’ and ‘lobbying’ are evidence-based ways to drive policy change and yet, they are considered undesirable by most academics. What can we thus learn from academics who have pushed the boundaries of what is perceived as ‘worthy’ scholarship and have successfully shaped environmental policy by embracing their role as activists? And: What is necessary for academia to embrace these strategies in order to create change? On a quest to finding the answers to these questions and putting them into action, Verena collaborates with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and the Planetary Health Alliance to transform academics into effective environmental advocates. Verena is excited and grateful to have the support of two amazing supervisors: David Boyd (IRES) and Paul Kershaw (School of Population and Public Health).

Featured Publications

Rossa-Roccor, V., Giang, A., & Kershaw, P. (2021). Framing climate change as a human health issue: Enough to tip the scale in climate policy? The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(8), e553-e559. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00113-3

Gadermann, A.M., Russell, L.B., Palepu, A., Thomson, K.C., Norena, M., Rossa-Roccor, V., Hwang, S.W., Aubrey, T., Karim, M.E., Farrell, S., Hubley, A. (2021). Understanding subjective quality of life in homeless and vulnerably housed individuals: The role of housing, health, substance use, and social support. SSM – Mental Health 1, 100021.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2021.100021.

Rossa-Roccor, V., Richardson, C. G., Murphy, R. A., & Gadermann, A. M. (2021). The association between diet and mental health and wellbeing in young adults within a biopsychosocial framework. PLOS One, 16(6), e0252358. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252358

Rossa-Roccor, V., & Karim, M. E. (2021). Are US adults with low-exposure to methylmercury at increased risk for depression? A study based on 2011–2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES). International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 94(3), 419-431. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00420-020-01592-9

Rossa-Roccor, V., Schmid, P., & Steinert, T. (2020). Victimization of people with severe mental illness outside and within the mental health care system: results on prevalence and risk factors from a multicenter study. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 932. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.563860

Rossa-Roccor, V., Acheson, E. S., Andrade-Rivas, F., Coombe, M., Ogura, S., Super, L., & Hong, A. (2020). Scoping review and bibliometric analysis of the term “planetary health” in the peer-reviewed literature. Frontiers in Public Health, 8, 343. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00343

Clair, V., Rossa-Roccor, V., Mokaya, A. G., Mutiso, V., Musau, A., Tele, A., … & Frank, E. (2019). Peer-and mentor-enhanced web-based training on substance use disorders: a promising approach in low-resource settings. Psychiatric Services, 70(11), 1068-1071. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201900201

Stone, S. B., Myers, S. S., & Golden, C. D., & The Planetary Health Education Brainstorm Group.(2018). Cross-cutting principles for planetary health education. The Lancet Planetary Health, 2(5), e192-e193. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(18)30022-6

Rossa-Roccor, V., Malatskey, L., & Frank, E. (2017). NextGenU. org’s free, globally available online training in lifestyle medicine. American journal of lifestyle medicine, 11(2), 132-133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1559827616682444

Atlanta-Marinna Grant

MA with Hannah Wittman & Maggie Low, 2023

Contact Details

atlanta.grant@ubc.ca

mobile: 9053926458

Research Interests

Climate change, Community-based research, First Nations and Resource Management, Food security

Bio

Kwe (hello!)

Atlanta Grant is an Iroquois woman (she/her) with mixed Huron-Wendat and German ancestry, originally from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Ojibwe, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. She is a present guest on the traditional territories of the xwməθkwəýəm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Atlanta is a recent graduate (M.A) of the University of British Columbia in the Institute of Resources, Environment, and Sustainability. Her research focuses on Indigenous Food Systems, Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Decolonized Research Methodologies, Cultural Preservation, and Cross-Cultural Collaborations.

Atlanta’s Master’s thesis focused on Indigenous food ‘cycling’ practices and the reinstatement of Indigenous Natural Law, operating in opposition to the settler-colonial industrial food systems production of food ‘waste’. Food ‘cycling’ contains the processes of ‘intentional honor’ and ‘intentional repurpose’ that surround the consumption of animals and plants, how they inform Indigenous Law, and other Indigenous Biocultural Heritage practices and teachings.

Her professional work focuses on what safe decolonized collaborative spaces should look like within cross-cultural partnerships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples. Focusing on collaboration that is rooted within Indigenous customs, protocols, and traditions, in ways that avoid the over-burdening of Indigenous knowledge systems, inappropriate integrations of Indigenous Knowledge into Western systems, and the pan- Indigenizing of Indigenous voices. Atlanta can be contacted through her website https://atlantagrant.com/ and/or through the University of British Columbia’s Food Sovereignty Research Lab.

Celeste Pomerantz

MSc Student

Research Interests

Energy, Geosciences

Bio

Celeste Pomerantz is a masters (MSc) student in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, supervised by Dr. M.V. Ramana. Her research focuses on energy storage and grid optimization in Canadian remote and off-grid communities. She has a BSc in natural sciences from the University of Calgary concentrating in alternative energy and geosciences. During her undergrad, she focused her projects on alternative energy storage systems writing and co-authoring several papers including Fuel Cells for Heavy Freight Transport, Pumped Hydroelectric Storage, and Hydrogen as a Future Energy Source. She also aided Dr. Jason Donev on his award winning Energy Education Encyclopedia where she had over twenty pages published to the educational site.

Celeste grew up on the north shore of Vancouver and spent nearly all of her time outdoors, her interests became deeply rooted in the natural environment and as a result, has dedicated her education and future career to saving it. Immediately after her undergrad, she moved to Squamish, BC to spend as much time outside as possible, you can find her backcountry skiing in the winter or mountain biking in the summer.

Mauricio Carvallo Aceves

PhD student, P. Eng.

Peter Wall Legacy Award

Les Lavkulich Award for Outstanding Leadership and Service, 2023

Mitacs Accelerate Fellow

Four Year Fellowship Recipient, NSERC Alexander Graham Bell

IRES Student Society Co-President, 2022-2023

Contact Details

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/mauricio-carvallo-aceves-92567a106

Research Interests

Adaptation, Climate change, Environment, Infrastructure systems, Natural hazards, Participatory action research, Policy and Decision-making, Resilience, Sustainability, Urban Sustainbility, Vulnerability and risk

Bio

Mauricio joined IRES in 2020 as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Stephanie Chang. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at ITESO (Mexico) in 2012. Having lived in big cities all his life, he quickly became passionate about sustainable urban development. Through his involvement in various projects during his undergraduate studies, Mauricio started working on infrastructure, and more specifically, drainage networks. He later went on to study a Master of Engineering at Polytechnique Montreal in 2014, focusing on sustainable stormwater management. Beyond the technical aspects of infrastructure, Mauricio is interested in a more holistic analysis by incorporating aspects such as social perception and acceptance, environmental impacts/benefits, and economic costs.

After his Master’s degree, he went on to work for 4 years as a municipal engineer in the Montreal area, setting up and calibrating drainage network models for developing long-term water management plans.

Through his doctoral studies, Mauricio aims to contribute to climate change adaptation strategies by improving our understanding of the trade-offs of different coastal adaptation strategies under uncertain sea level rise scenarios, in the hopes of developing more robust long-term plans. He is also participating in the Resilient-C project, an online platform seeking to connect coastal communities across Canada to exchange ideas on strategies for facing coastal hazards. His work at IRES is supported by an NSERC – Canada Graduate Scholarship.

When he is not working, chances are Mauricio is out on a terrace with friends or practicing lindy-hop with a swing dance troupe.

Featured Publications

Carvallo Aceves, M., Fuamba, M., & Angui, J. (2017) Water Quality Performance of In-series BMPs. Journal of Water Management Modeling, doi: 10.14796/JWMM.C430

Sebti, A., Carvallo Aceves, M., Bennis, S., & Fuamba, M. (2016). Improving Nonlinear Optimization Algorithms for BMP Implementation in a Combined Sewer System. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 04016030.

Carvallo Aceves, M. Fuamba, M., (2016). Methodology for selecting Best Management Practices integrating multiple stakeholders and criteria. Part 1 : Methodology. Water 8 (2), 55 doi:10.3390/w8020055

Carvallo Aceves, M. Fuamba, M., (2016). Methodology for selecting Best Management Practices integrating multiple stakeholders and criteria. Part 2 : Case study. Water 8 (2) 56 doi:10.3390/w8020056