RESEARCH TEAM FACULTY PROFILES
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Dr. Kirby Calvert
Co-director, Community Energy Knowledge and Action Partnership.
Kirby received his PhD in Geography (2013) through the Queen's Institute of Energy and Environmental Policy, where he developed concepts and techniques to assess and spatially plan for local renewable energy generation.
As an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University (2013-2015), Dr. Calvert broadened his research program to understand how existing and emerging renewable energy technologies interface with landscapes, land-use plans, and land-based economies.
In 2015, Kirby brought this research program to the Geography Department at the University of Guelph and to CEKAP. He resigned from the University of Guelph in 2020 and continues to support community energy planning in a non-academic capacity. |
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Dr. Michelle Adams
Associate Professor, School for Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS)
Co-investigator, Community Energy Knowledge and Action Partnership.
Dr. Adams’s research focusses on an interdisciplinary understanding of the policies, strategies, and technologies needed to improve the long-term sustainability of businesses, industrial operations and the societies they intersect. She is the Primary Investigator for a recently award NSERC Strategic Partnership grant entitled “Guiding sustainable bio-industrial synergies for optimal GHG mitigation and regional economic development” which focuses on knowledge transfer strategies that can improve the integration of green technologies and renewable energy as rural economic drivers.
In 2009, Dr. Adams co-authored the “Nova Scotia Renewable Energy Strategy” report, which provided the foundations for the “Renewable Electricity Plan” announced in April, 2010 by the Nova Scotia government. Since that time much of her work has focused on identifying the enabling factors and barriers to more sustainable energy strategies such as energy efficiency and the development of decentralize, community-owned renewable energy systems. |
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Dr. Jamie Baxter
Professor, Department of Geography, Western University (London, ON)
Co-investigator, Community Energy Knowledge and Action Partnership.
Dr. Baxter is an academic leader in conducting case-study research involving primary data collection on the role of risk perception in renewable energy development, siting, and community impacts. His expertise in advising and conducting comparative research in rural communities across Ontario is essential to the success of the research.
Dr. Baxter has years of experience in qualitative and mixed methods research design involving community engaged scholarship, including grounded theory approaches with interviews, surveys and media analysis having published on these themes in top journals. He is a principal investigator on two related research projects: Communities Around Renewable Energy Projects (CoAREP) and Realizing Waste’s Resource Potential (ReWaRP). |
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Dr. Mark Jaccard
Professor, School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC)
Co-investigator, Community Energy Knowledge and Action Partnership.
Mark has been a professor since 1986 in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University. His PhD is from the Energy Economics and Policy Institute at the University of Grenoble. He has published over 100 academic papers, most of these related to his principal research focus: the design and application of energy-economy models that assess the effectiveness of sustainable energy and climate policies.
For this career research, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009 and British Columbia’s Academic of the Year in 2008. He has contributed to several major processes and assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (93-96 and 2010-2012), the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (1995-2001 and 2007-2009), Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (2006-2009), British Columbia’s Climate Action Team (2007-2009), and the Global Energy Assessment (2008-2012). In 2006, his book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, won the Donner Prize for top policy book in Canada.
At Simon Fraser University he teaches graduate and undergraduate versions of an interdisciplinary course in energy and materials sustainability, covering basic physics, technologies, economics, policy and human cognition and behavior. |
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Dr. Mark Winfield
Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University (Toronto, ON)
Co-investigator, Community Energy Knowledge and Action Partnership.
Mark Winfield is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University. He is also Co-Chair of the Faculty's Sustainable Energy Initiative, and Coordinator of the Joint Master of Environmental Studies/Juris Doctor program offered in conjunction with Osgoode Hall Law School. Prior to joining York University Professor Winfield was Program Director with the Pembina Institute and prior to that Director of Research with the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy.
He has published articles, book chapters and reports on a wide range of environmental and energy law and policy topics. His book, Blue-Green Province: The Environment and Political Economy of Ontario was published by UBC Press in 2012. |
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