SHIFT Faculty
Meet the Concordia faculty members who are applying their work to address community priorities, building collaborations, and turning their research into actions that make a difference.
SHIFT Fellows
SHIFT Fellows are Concordia faculty who make significant contributions to the Centre through sustained research, teaching, and knowledge mobilization commitments.
Dr. Felice Yuen
Professor, Applied Human Sciences
Dr. Yuen has been engaged with SHIFT since 2020 as a contributor to SHIFT-funded project team Li-Ber-T House, an organization that provides housing and support services for women transitioning out of addiction treatment programs. Her collaboration with Li-Ber-T House is aligned with her on-going work with Indigenous women who have been involved in the criminal justice system (see collective-healing.net). In 2025, she is leading a developmental evaluation of SHIFT’s Research and Advocacy Program to understand the program’s impact and inform its evolution.
Dr. Govind Gopakumar
Associate Professor and Chair, Centre for Engineering in Society
Dr. Gopakumar joined SHIFT as part of its initial Interim Leadership Team and later our Steering Committee and Governance Hub, contributing to SHIFT’s strategic leadership from 2019-2024. Since 2024, he has been leading a research collaboration with SHIFT-funded project team Tka:nios through which Sociology and Engineering students support the Kahnawake-based agriculture collective to plan and build a sovereign, sustainable agri-food hub.
SHIFT Scholars
SHIFT Scholars are Concordia faculty who contribute to SHIFT projects and partners through punctual engagements with their courses and research. Appointments are defined collaboratively and designated at SHIFT’s discretion.
Ted Rutland
Associate Professor, Geography, Planning and Environment
Meghan Joy
Associate Professor, Political Science
Since 2024, Professors Joy and Rutland have been advising SHIFT Research and Advocacy Program project “Plateau Pour Tous: Understanding municipal land use policies and processes to advocate for the Plateau's unhoused Indigenous population”. They draw from their respective disciplines to enrich and evolve this research initiative in service of the aims of SHIFT partner the Indigenous Support Work Project.
Kevin Yuen-Kit Lo
Assistant Professor, Communication Design and Visual Culture, Design and Computation Arts
In 2021, students from Professor Lo’s Design Lab course collaborated with SHIFT-led research project “Transforming Montreal in Times of Crisis: Community Organizing and Collective Learnings During the COVID Pandemic”. Students designed an interactive webpage to share research findings in a dynamic and accessible format. Kevin also collaborated with SHIFT to launch his book: Design Against Design - Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice.
Erik Chevrier
Part-time Instructor, Geography, Planning, and Environment
In 2021, students in Professor Chevrier’s “Ecological Economics” course collaborated with SHIFT-led research project “How Can the Depot’s Community Food Centre Limit Green Gentrification?”, a partnership with The Depot Community Food Centre. Students developed case studies for the project and contributed to its annotated bibliography.
Suchit Ahuja
Associate Professor, Supply Chain and Business Technology Management
In 2020-21, Professor Ahuja was instrumental in stewarding collaborations between SHIFT partners Women on the Rise and Recreotherapy with The Americas Conference on Information Systems, through which student groups were paired with each organization to work in an IT consulting role enabling the analyses for and development of critical IT solutions. For more on these projects, please see here.
