Our Faculty and Staff come from a wide variety of backgrounds from Brock University and beyond. Summaries of their research interests with keywords are provided below, along with links to further information if applicable.
GRADUATE PROGRAM Director
Marilyne Jollineau
Graduate Program Director
Email: mjollineau@brocku.ca
Centre Administrator
Amanda Smits
Centre Administrator
Email: asmits@brocku.ca
Graduate Program Coordinator
Erin Daly
Coordinator, ESRC
Email: SSAS@brocku.ca
Core Faculty
Julia Baird
CRC (Tier II) in Human Dimensions of Water Resources and Water Resilience
Assistant Professor, Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
Research interests: water resources governance; resilience; social-ecological systems; social networks; agriculture
Jessica Blythe
Assistant Professor, Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
Research interests: resilience, adaptation, transformation, coastal communities, social-ecological systems
Christine Daigle
Professor, Philosophy
Research interests: anthropocene; posthumanist ontology; posthumanist ethics
Keywords: Existential Phenomenology; Feminist Theory; Posthumanism
Diane Dupont
Professor, Economics
Interim Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies
Research areas: water, non-market valuation, behaviour, fisheries
Keywords: regulatory impacts on decisions, ecosystem services, GIS, surveys
Xavier Fazio
Associate Professor, Department of Teacher Education
Research interests: environmental learning; sustainability education; complex system theory; communities; public understanding of science
Keywords: science education; environmental education; teacher cognition and practices; complex systems theory
Presentation: Teaching and Learning for Environmental Sustainability
Todd Green
Assistant Professor, Marketing, International Business & Strategy
Research areas: consumer response to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); the role of CSR in marketing communications; consumer response to environmentally friendly marketing; the role of CSR and Ethics in the Arts and Entertainment industries; the influence of retailer size on the consumer response to both socially responsible and irresponsible behaviour; the research-practice gap in CSR-related advertising.
Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); advertising; consumer behaviour
Timothy Heinmiller
Associate Professor, Political Science
Research interests: water policy in developed countries; politics of water in irrigation economies; politics of water allocation in irrigation areas
Keywords: politics, water, irrigation, Alberta, Great Lakes
Marilyne Jollineau
Associate Professor, Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
Research interests: use of geospatial technologies to map, monitor and evaluate inland/shoreline wetland ecosystems in Ontario; use of geospatial technologies to assess vineyard condition in the Niagara Region for improved management
Keywords: wetland ecosystems; water resources; sustainable agriculture/viticulture; vineyard management; geospatial technologies
Francine McCarthy
Professor and Graduate Program Director, Earth Sciences, Brock University
Acting Graduate Program Director, Sustainability Science and Society, Brock University
Core Member, Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
Associate Member, Biological Sciences, Brock University
Marcel Oestreich
Assistant Professor, Economics
Research interests: Environmental Economics, Applied Game Theory, Industrial Organization and Empirical Finance, more specifically, the use of microeconomic models to study the impact of environmental regulation on the competitiveness of regulated firms.
Gary Pickering
Research interests: psychological barriers that prevent individuals from being proactive on sustainability and climate change issues, and strategies for addressing those barriers (including optimising communication); climate change adaptation in the grape and wine industry
Keywords:climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, psychological barriers, wine
Meet the ESRC Faculty Affiliates: Dr. Gary Pickering (VIDEO)
Michael Pisaric
Professor, Geography and Tourism Studies
Research interests: impacts of climate and environmental change on northern ecosystems; climate and environmental change across a variety of timescales
Keywords: climate change; biogeography; physical geography; Arctic
Paleoecology Lab at Brock University
Ryan Plummer
Professor, Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
Research areas: Adaptive co-management, social ecological resilience, environmental governance, water governance and management, adaptive capacity
Research interests: adaptive and collaborative approached to management, social ecological systems, enhancing environmental decision making and management, building adaptive and transformative capacity, policy development and transfer, collaborative natural resource management
Kevin Turner
Associate Professor, Geography and Tourism Studies
Research interests: hydrology, hydroecology; GIS, spatial analysis, and remote sensing; water isotope tracers; biogeochemical cycling; paleolimnological reconstruction of past lake conditions; linkages among lakes, rivers, land cover, and climate
Liette Vasseur
Professor, Biological Sciences
Research interests: sustainable agriculture; community-based natural resource management, with special emphasis on empowering women; integrating issues of biodiversity conservation; how ecosystem-based adaptation and other such approaches can help enhance resilience and sustainability of rural communities.
Keywords: sustainable agriculture; ecosystem; biodiversity; adaptation; gender issues
Participating Faculty
Adam Dickinson
Associate Professor, English Language & Literature
Research areas: poetics, biomonitoring, microbiome, ecocriticism, anthropocene
Keywords: blood, chemicals, metabolism, microbes, writing
Garrett Hutson
Associate Professor, Recreation and Leisure Studies, Brock University
Research areas: place meanings, sense of place, outdoor recreation management, outdoor education, recreation stewardship strategies
Keywords: sustainable outdoor education, sense-of-place education, place meanings
Meet the ESRC Faculty Affiliates: Dr. Garrett Hutson (VIDEO)
Tim O’Connell
Professor, Applied Health Sciences – Recreation & Leisure Studies
Research interests: psychological sense of community of people engaged in outdoor pursuits, sense of place, impacts of participating in outdoor activities on mental health, outdoor orientation programs, reflective practice, outdoor leadership, outdoor education, experiential education.
Keywords: outdoor education, experiential education, sense of place, outdoor pursuits, outdoor orientation programs, reflective practice
Adjunct Professors
Jennifer Baltzer
Department of Biology, Wilfrid Laurier University
The main focus of my research group is the functional basis of plant species distributions. Trade-offs between stress tolerance and performance contribute strongly to species distributions and may provide a more general basis for species range sizes and patterns of local distribution. We focus on forest ecosystems including tropical, temperate and boreal forests.
Bronwyn Benkert
Yukon College
Research interests: northern hydrology; permafrost; climate change adaptation; northern resilience; past and future landscape change in response to changes in climate; the way environmental changes impact people who use the land; how science and local knowledge can support resilient planning and decision making
Keywords: northern hydrology, rivers, water isotope tracers, paleohydrology, permafrost, climate change, adaptation planning, capacity building, resilience, science to policy
Gillian Dale
Postdoctoral Fellow – Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, Brock University
Gillian holds a Ph.D. in Behavioural Neuroscience (Cognitive Psychology) from Brock University, and previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her previous research explored individual difference factors (i.e., personality, affect, motivational intensity, etc.) that explain variations in cognitive performance and behaviour. She has extensive experience with research design, questionnaire development and validation, and advanced data analysis. Currently, she is interested in extending her line of research by applying her expertise in both human behaviour and advanced data analysis to real-world problems (e.g., water resilience; environmental stewardship).
Ryan Bullock
University of Winnipeg
Jennifer Fresque-Baxter
Government of the Northwest Territories
Claudia Baldwin
University of the Sunshine Coast
Sherman Farhad
Brock University
Jack Imhof
Trout Unlimited Canada
Erin Kelly
Government of the Northwest Territories
Wendee Kubik
Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies
Research interests: women, agriculture, water, gender analysis, aboriginal
Bradley May
Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
Research interests: Climate change adaptation, hazards and disaster management, teaching environmental management and sustainability, environmental law and, compliance theory
Keywords: governance, social-ecological systems, cross-scale dynanics
E-mail: bmay@brocku.ca
Twitter: @BradKMay
Timothy Smith
University of Sunshine Coast, Australia
Dana Thomsen
University of Sunshine Coast, Australia
Micaela Trimble
PhD in Natural Resources and Environmental Management (University of Manitoba)
Member of the National System of Researchers of Uruguay in the Social Sciences
Research and Cooperation Coordinator at the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies (SARAS)
Research interests: Social-ecological systems, adaptive co-management, water governance, small-scale fisheries, marine protected areas, participatory research and evaluation, citizen participation in environmental issues, climate change adaptation and resilience.
Alison S. Waller
Environmental Sustainability Research Centre
An interdisciplinary Environmental Engineer/Computational Scientist with expertise in Applied and Environmental Microbiology with areas of interest including bioremediation and the human microbiome
Research interests: microbiology of environmental and human-associated microbial communities, bioremediation of contaminated water, water quality int he Great Lakes (focus on emerging contaminants), analysis of large-scale data sets (focus on (meta)genomic sequences, microarray data, and high-throughput chemical genomic and metabolic data), integration and visualization of multiple datasets
E-mail: Alison.sara.waller@gmail.com
Librarians
Heather Whipple
James A. Gibson Library
Heather is the liaison librarian for the SSAS program, and can help researchers find and use secondary data while promoting best practices in research data management. She also offers support for GIS and geospatial data use.
Research interests: Feminist science fiction, cultural geographies of outer space, Ursula K Le Guin
E-mail: hwhipple@brocku.ca
Twitter: @hhwlib
Co-op
Cara Boese
Director, Co-op, Career & Experiential Education Programs, cboese@brocku.ca
Melissa Beamer
Senior Employer Development Manager, mbeamer2@brocku.ca
