Currently I am working with a multi-disciplinary team of researchers examining farmers’ decisions to adopt automation and robotics technology in Ontario. We will also soon start a new project that examines how to better disseminate best management practices for pest management among farmers in Ontario. Both projects are led by Dr. Charles Conteh in Brock’s Department of Political Science. Before that I was working on a multi-disciplinary project led by Dr. Mary-Beth Raddon and Dr. Dennis Soron that examined the effectiveness of a poverty amelioration program operated by Ontario’s Niagara Region. Before that I was part of a multi-disciplinary team that examined the degree of precarious employment in Ontario’s Niagara Region. While I am still interested in issues of regional economic development and regional political economy, I find that focusing on narrower topics in research teams is a more enjoyable and fruitful experience for my own development and learning as scholar. I’m also helping a colleague in Brock’s Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, Dr. Kyle Rich, examine the geography of participation in provincial sports organizations (PSOs).

In all these recent projects I’ve gotten to work with quantitative data (from surveys I helped design, plus Statistics Canada data and commercial databases), learn new statistical software (SPSS and now R), practice coding qualitative data using thematic coding software and conducting spatial analysis using GIS (most recently, QGIS). I’ve also occasionally conducted and transcribed an interview. What they all have in common is an interest in the geographical impacts of public policy, though some do this more explicitly than others. I consider myself a mixed-methods researcher whose work is informed by regional political economy.

I’m interested in supervising students who have an interest in regional political economy, regional development, labor markets, innovation, mixed-methods research, cultural industries, especially when these interests are harnessed to evaluate the effectiveness of public policy. Over the years I have directly supervised MA students who have applied discourse analysis, regression models, survival analysis and spatial analysis for their theses and MRPs. I prefer to supervise students who have developed their own interests, and then I provide feedback to help scaffold them towards a (more-or-less) timely and successful completion. I am comfortable supervising students whose research focuses on locations outside of Canada, as my own MA and PhD research were focused on and supported by fieldwork in a reunified Germany. In addition, I was trained in departments sympathetic to the goal of Area Studies as an interdisciplinary venture. Having worked in an environment where I could not rely on my first language, I have appreciation for the difficulties facing students who speak English-as-a-subsequent language. As a result, when I provide feedback, I attempt to help students write more clearly and concisely (though these three paragraphs might indicate that my desire does not match my competence), qualities I always appreciated when reading texts in German. I am slowly learning French from my daughter and Duo Lingo. I have extremely limited knowledge of (Western Hemispheric) Spanish.

Please contact me for more information.