Sandeep Pai

PhD with Hisham Zerriffi, 2021
Senior Research Lead, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Contact Details

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/ https://www.csis.org/people/sandeep-pai https://twitter.com/Sandeeppaii

Bio

Sandeep Pai is senior research lead with the Energy Security and Climate Change program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His expertise spans the political economy of energy transitions, coal sector dynamics, energy access, and just transitions. Previously, Sandeep worked as an investigative journalist with leading Indian newspapers such as the Hindustan Times, writing on rural development, energy transition, and political corruption in India and South Asia. In 2016, he was awarded India’s most prestigious journalism award, the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism award, for his series of stories on corruption in state-owned enterprises. In 2018, he published his first book on global energy transitions, titled Total Transition: The Human Side of the Renewable Energy Revolution. He holds a PhD in resources, environment, and sustainability from the University of British Columbia and a joint MSc degree in environmental sciences, policy, and management from Lund University, Central European University.

Last updated March 2022

Glory O Apantaku

PhD Student

Contact Details

glory.apantaku@ubc.ca

Research Interests

Adaptation, Health, Policy and Decision-making

Bio

Glory Apantaku is a Ph.D. student supervised by Dr. Terre Satterfield and Dr. Mark Harrison. Her research interest is in exploring areas for intersectoral collaboration to address health vulnerabilities to climate change. Glory holds a BSc. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington and an MSc. in Population and Public health from the University of British Columbia. She’s also supported research projects evaluating health policies in British Columbia and exploring priorities for healthcare in rural BC.

Google Scholar

Jack Durant

MA with Daniel Steel & Gunilla Öberg, 2022

Bio

At IRES Jack worked as part of the Egesta Lab studying the expert deliberation surrounding endocrine-disrupting chemical pollution. Supervised by Gunilla Oberg, Daniel Steel and Annegaaike Leopold, Jack’s research project involved a ‘brokered dialogue’ between two experts from different sides of the conversation, facilitating discussion between them and analysing their respective understandings of uncertainty in the field. The study found a substantial difference in the understood forms of uncertainty, as well as the generating factors. Since graduating, Jack has been working at an environmental non-profit in the UK called Youngwilders which facilitates small-scale, youth-led nature recovery projects.

Last updated May 2022

Helina Jolly

PhD with Terre Satterfield & Milind Kandlikar, 2022
Research Associate, Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Solutions

Contact Details

helina[dot]jolly@ubc[dot]ca

www.helinajolly.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/helinajolly/ https://twitter.com/HelinaJolly

Bio

Helina obtained her PhD from the Institute for Resources Environment and Sustainability under the supervision of Terre Satterfield and Milind Kandlikar. She is currently a Research Associate at the Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Solutions. Her doctoral work ‘Reimagining Conservation Landscapes: Adivasi Characterizations of the Human Dimensions of Southern Indian Forests‘ investigates how India’s forest and wildlife management outlook represents Indigenous people’s understanding of nature. She worked with a hunter-forager Adivasi (Indigenous) community in Southern India. She found that their values and views of the forest landscapes, wild animals, forest fire, and forest food contrast significantly with the understandings that underpin India’s protected areas and wildlife policies.

Helina also produced an ethnographic documentary titled Gidiku Vapathu (2020) on Kattunayaka People to understand how these traditional societies perceive and interact with forests. She also leads the Collective for Gender+ in Research at the UBC, which seeks to develop a network to articulate methods and tools to engage gender in research.

Helina has nearly ten years of work experience in natural resource management, focusing on projects in South Asia with the German Development Cooperation (GIZ), Centre for Science and Environment and Clinton Climate Initiative. She is a Commonwealth Scholar and has an MSc in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She can be reached at helina[dot]jolly[at]ubc[dot]ca and www.helinajolly.com.

Carmen Wan

Program Specialist, UBC Sustainability Hub

Contact Details

carmen.wan@ubc.ca

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wankahmun

Research Interests

Behavioral change, Climate change, Corporate social responsibility

Bio

Carmen was a Master of Science in the Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability, supervised by Dr. Kai Ostwald in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy & Global Affairs. Her research explored connections between organizational culture and agency for sustainability in corporate organizations. More specifically, her research uncovered the importance of organizational culture in driving corporate sustainability. She sought to unfold cultural factors such as structures and processes, customs, values, attitudes and taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions that uphold sustainability agents’ sense of agency for sustainability who often sit in a contradictory space and are pressured to challenge the dominant discourse of economic growth. She also anticipated using a cultural lens to make sense of the acts, behaviour and decisions towards sustainability issues that we often ﬁnd incomprehensible in our organizational life.

Carmen completed her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science at the University of Nottingham. After graduation, she gained experience as a professional sustainability analyst and project manager for a low-cost airline company in Malaysia and an agribusiness giant in Singapore. Carmen is passionate about community climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as behavioural change for sustainability in private organizations. This had led her to initiate various sustainability projects tackling social and environmental issues in energy, waste, ocean pollution, climate change, climate disasters and sustainable development for rural communities throughout her professional career in private organizations.

Carmen was also the Climate Action Projects Coordinator at the UBC Centre for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), a centre that catalyzes, designs, and implements opportunities for students to apply their knowledge and skills to help address social and environmental issues by collaborating with diverse university and community partners and stakeholders.

Last updated May 2024.

Claire Ewing

MSc with Amanda Giang and David Boyd, 2021, Senior Policy and Planning Analyst, Metro Vancouver

Contact Details

https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-ewing/

Bio

At IRES, Claire studied environmental justice and the enforcement of air pollution laws in Canada. She found enforcement data quality and enforcement practices to be poor, and that enforcement was distributed differently across demographic groups (suggesting possible environmental justice issues). After working at Metro Vancouver for a Sustainability Scholars project, she joined the Air Quality and Climate Change group at Metro Vancouver after graduating. She now works as a Senior Policy and Planning Analyst, supporting the region’s transition to net zero emissions, particularly through the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors.

Read a Q&A with Claire here!

Last updated March 2024

Matthew Mitchell

Assistant Professor, UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems

Contact Details

matthew[dot]mitchell[at]ubc.ca

https://mgemitchell.weebly.com https://twitter.com/MGEMitchell

Bio

Matthew Mitchell is appointed in LFS, not at IRES, and instead is a Faculty Associate of our unit. He may supervise students in our RES graduate program.

Matthew Mitchell is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems and UBC. His research focuses on how to manage human-dominated landscapes, including agricultural and urban landscapes, for both people and nature. This includes understanding how the arrangement of different land uses and habitats across these areas affects ecosystem services and biodiversity, how to effectively quantify both the supply of ecosystem services and their demand by people, and identifying key management actions that can lead to win-win situations for multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity. He also leads the long-term biodiversity monitoring program at the UBC Farm and is working to develop new tools to effectively monitor agricultural biodiversity on diversified farms and link this to key socio-ecological outcomes. He completed his Ph.D. at McGill University in 2014, a M.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 2006, and a B.Sc. (Honours) at the University of Victoria in 2002.

Patrick Meyfroidt

Previous Visiting Professor

Bio

Patrick Meyfroidt holds a PhD in geography (2009) and a degree in sociology from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium. Since 2016 he is Research Associate at the F.R.S-FNRS (the Belgian Research Funds) and Professor at UCLouvain.

His research focuses on how land use and more broadly land systems can contribute to sustainability.
His main research interests are land use transitions, i.e. non-linear land use dynamics at broad scale such as forest transitions and emergence of land use frontiers; linkages between globalization and land use including supply chain interventions to halt deforestation; theories of land system change; and social-ecological feedbacks.

His recent projects include the MIDLAND project https://erc-midland.earth/ (ERC Starting Grant) investigating emerging agricultural and forestry frontiers in Mozambique and Southern Africa; the SUSTAIN-COCOA project https://epl.ethz.ch/research/SUSTAIN-COCOA.html researching cocoa supply chains, deforestation and sustainability in West Africa; the COUPLED project https://coupled-itn.eu/ investigating telecouplings and sustainability issues; and participations to the Trase initiative https://www.trase.earth/ .

He visited UBC (Liu Institute / SPPGA & IRES) from August 2022 to July 2023.

Nicole Kaechele

PhD Candidate; 4 Year Fellowship; SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship; UBC Public Scholar; SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant

Contact Details

nicolekaechele[dot]bc[at]gmail.com rioprojectmanagement[at]gmail.com

Professional profile: www.rioprojectmanagement.com

Research Interests

Community-based research, Compensation, First Nations and Resource Management, Policy and Decision-making, Reconciliation, Resource governance and management

Bio

Nicole (Nikki) Kaechele is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability under the co-supervision of Drs. Terre Satterfield and Tricia Logan. Her research focuses on the revitalization of Indigenous legal processes and the negotiation of compensation agreements for historical losses. Nikki’s research methods are interdisciplinary and community-engaged, with a focus on decolonizing research processes in collaboration with community and organizational partners.

Nikki holds an MREM from the University of Dalhousie, where she focused on geographies of health and the application of community-based participatory research methods. She also holds an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Environmental Studies from the University of Victoria. Nikki lives and works from rural-remote communities in BC, supporting Indigenous-led planning, stewardship, and government-to-government processes. Of particular influence has been her collaborative work in ancestral governance, co-developing the Nuxalk Ancestral Governance project with colleagues and mentors from the Nuxalk Nation.

Nikki has a close network of family and friends who keep her sane and grounded. In particular, her husband and two kids, and their infinite imaginations, make for much time spent in the mountains and waters of BC, and always eating good food.

Featured Publications

Kaechele, N., Beveridge, R., Adams, M., Boyce, P., Artelle, K. (2023). A primer for the practice of reflexivity in Conservation Science. Conservation Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13047

Click here to download a visual primer created in association with this paper

Gregory, R., Halteman, P., Kaechele, N., Satterfield, T. (2023). Methods for Assessing Social and Cultural Losses. Science, Vol 381, pp. 478-481. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi2206

Nunanta (Iris Siwallace)., Kaechele, N., Jean-Leischner, E. (2022). Indigenizing Academic Minds to Work with Community: A Joint Reflection on the Everyday Work of Building Good Research Relationships. In The Community-Based PhD: Complexities and Triumphs of Conducting CBPR. Edited by Sonya Atalay and Alexandra McCleary. University of Arizona Press: 237-252.

Gregory, R., Halteman, P., Kaechele, N., Kotaska, J., Satterfield, T. (2020). Compensating Indigenous social and cultural losses: a community-based multiple-attribute approach. Ecology and Society 25(4):4. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12038-250404

Joséphine Gantois

Assistant Professor, IRES
Assistant Professor, Land and Food Systems

Contact Details

https://josephine.gantois.lecuyer.me

LFS Profile: https://www.landfood.ubc.ca/josephine-gantois/

Bio

Joséphine Gantois is an Assistant Professor in Human Dimensions of Biodiversity Conservation, jointly appointed in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and in the Food and Resource Economics Program. Her research is motivated by the need to assess and address the ecological footprint of humans in natural and agricultural landscapes. She is interested in evaluating practical solutions to reconcile private land use incentives and conservation goals, especially in agricultural areas; in monitoring biodiversity outcomes and ecosystem functions at large scales; and in estimating the causal impact of land use choices and conservation policies on biodiversity. Her research combines approaches, data, and knowledge from economics and ecology primarily, with an emphasis on causal inference, but also draws from remote sensing and machine learning tools.