Institute Leaders
Sarah Burch is a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Sustainability Governance and Innovation in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Canada. Through her research, writing, and teaching, she explores transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, and innovative strategies for accelerating transitions toward resilient, low carbon communities.
She is a Coordinating Lead Author of the Earth System Governance project’s New Directions Initiative, which is creating the Science and Implementation Plan that will influence an international network of more than 3000 environmental governance scholars over the next 10 years. She was a Coordinating Lead Author in the Second Assessment Report on Climate Change in Cities and a Contributing Author to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007). Dr. Burch was a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (2010-2013) and was awarded a Banting Fellowship for her work on sustainability governance
Carmela Cucuzzella holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Integrated Design and Sustainability for the Built Environment (IDEAS-BE). She has a background in various facets of design, holding degrees in Computer Science, Design Art, a Masters in Design and Complexity and a PhD in Environmental Design. Her research work is framed within the broad domain of design studies where she investigates questions of sustainable design for urban living.
Her theoretical framework revolves around questions of how qualitative judgment and quantitative evaluation are considered through the interrelated dimensions of the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive forms of discourse. This is quite relevant today, with the challenges of accommodating sustainability diagnostic or rating tools such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) alongside the creative conceptual exploration that takes place during the design process. She studies these as a means to gain a complex understanding of social, cultural and environmental repercussions of design practice today.
Govind Gopakumar is Associate Professor at the Centre for Engineering in Society,Concordia University. He received his PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research centres on the socio-political aspects of urban infrastructure and the governance of infrastructure change, predominantly in urban India. He is currently very interested in understanding the dynamics of mobility shifts in developing cities and is completing a book on the social and political aspects of congestion.
In addition to a film Social Life of a Bus (2015), a book Transforming Urban Water Supplies in India (Routledge 2012), he has published articles in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Water Policy, Water Alternatives, Mobilities, andGeoforum. His research has been supported by various federal and provincial research agencies. In 2010 he received the Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism from the American Sociological Association.
Sandy Lamalle is an international consultant and associate researcher at Concordia University. She worked as a legal consultant in London (CEIA), and legal adviser in international organisations (EU, UN, WHO) in Brussels and Geneva. She led research projects and programmes in international organisations (e.g. UNHCHR, OSCE, UNU-CRIS) and various research centres, including the Sydney Centre for International Law (SCIL), the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), and the Research Centre in Public Law (CRDP), University of Montreal. She holds a Ph.D in international Law (Geneva) and in European Union law (Strasbourg). She is a member and co-founder of the inter-sectorial and innovation research network ‘our Gulf’ on the environmental governance of the Saint-Lawrence river.
Towards sustainable futures in environmental law and governance, she notably works on the implementation of European and international norms (in her legal practice), on the implementation of the rights of Indigenous peoples (Reconciliation process; ILA Committee), and on the evolution of law and the determination of the legal subject. She is leading with Peter Stoett a project and working group on the representation and rights of/for the environment (ESGRREW), in the Taskforce for conceptual foundations of Earth System Governance. They will hold a Symposium on new narratives and paths for action at the World Conference on Humanities, 6-11th August in Liège (Belgium).
Audra Mitchell is CIGI Chair of Global Governance and Ethics at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada, and Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her current research explores global extinction from the perspective of plural Indigenous knowledge systems. She is particularly interested in how global structures of violence combine to produce global extinction and other large-scale ecological harms, and in decolonial approaches to addressing these harms. Previously, she has published widely on violence, security, posthumanism, international intervention and conflict transformation, and she has worked in universities across the UK, Australia and Canada.
Ketra Schmitt holds a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She teaches courses on risk analysis and the impacts of technology on society. Dr. Schmitt’s research involves quantitative risk analysis and decision making with particular focus on regulatory change and economic impacts of policies involving human health and environmental problems. Through the Systems Risk Laboratory Dr. Schmitt explores technical-social systems related to drinking water contaminants, disease outbreaks and terrorism. Dr. Schmitt is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Engineering and Society as well as the Director of the Individualized Program (INDI).
Paul Shrivastava, is the Executive Director, Future Earth global research platform. Prior to this appointment, he was the David O’Brien Distinguished Professor and Director of the David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University. He also leads the International Chair for Arts and Sustainable Enterprise at ICN Business School, Nancy, France.
He was part of the team of professionals who helped to found Hindustan Computer Ltd., one of India's largest computer companies. He founded the non-profit Industrial Crisis Institute, Inc. in New York, and published the Industrial Crisis Quarterly. He founded the journal Organization and Environment, (published by Sage Publications). He was founding President and CEO of eSocrates, Inc., a knowledge management software company, and the founding Chair of the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division of the Academy of Management.
He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He was tenured Associate Professor of Management at the Stern School of Business, NYU, and held the Howard I. Scott Chair in Management at Bucknell University. He has published 17 books and over 100 articles in refereed and scholarly journals.
Jonathan Tomkin is the Associate Director of the School of Earth, Society and Environment and a research Associate Professor in the department of Geology, at the University of Illinois. Dr. Tomkin directs the undergraduate program in Environmental Sustainability at the University, is a co-editor and contributing author of the textbook “Sustainability: a Comprehensive Introduction” and teaches the first environmentally-themed MOOC “Introduction to Sustainability” which has enrolled more than 100,000 participants from all over the world.
His research aims to uncover the processes of how changing climates, glaciers, and landscapes interact. This study integrates physical models with observations, and has required fieldwork all over the world - including the Olympic Mountains, the Swiss Alps, Svalbard, Patagonia, and Antarctica. He has recently started a new research program to examine the ways in which technology and institutional change can transform the practice of Higher Education.
Peter J. Stoett (PhD Queen’s, 1994) is currently the Director of the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre and Professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal and is currently the Provost Fellow for Sustainability. His main areas of expertise include international relations and law, global environmental politics, and human rights. From January-June, 2012 he was a Fulbright Research Chair at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Canada Institute, in Washington, D.C.; in 2013 he was an Erasmus Visiting Scholar at the International Institute for Social Studies in The Hague; in 2016 he was the Leverhulme Visiting Scholar in Climate Justice at the University of Reading, UK; in March-April 2017 he will hold a Provost Fellowship at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
