Faculty and Staff

Program Chairs

${name} Program Chair
Nora Casson
Phone: 204-258-3052
Email: mesc-chair@uwinnipeg.ca

${name} On Leave Winter 2024
Matt Dyce
Phone: 204-786-9370

Greetings from the Masters in Environmental and Social Change program at The University of Winnipeg! We are a dynamic community of scholars working together around our shared belief that the complex issues facing our social and ecological systems must be addressed using interdisciplinary and collaborative methods. This unique program is designed to help shape creative thinkers, researchers and communicators needed to address existing local, regional, and global challenges.

Students interested in joining the program are encouraged to reach out to individual faculty members.

Staff

${name} Program Assistant
Tania Guevara
Email: t.guevara@uwinnipeg.ca

Faculty

${name} Ryan Bullock
Email: r.bullock@uwinnipeg.ca

Adaptive governance, policy analysis, cross-cultural collaboration, forestry, bioenergy
Ryan Bullock is Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Human-Environment Interactions and Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, and Co-Chair of the Master in Environmental and Social Change program. He researches the human dimensions of environmental resources with a focus on how societies respond to social-ecological crises, conflicts and change.
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${name} Nora Cassson
Email: n.casson@uwinnipeg.ca

Water quality; ecosystems; hydrology; biogeochemistry
Nora Casson is the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Environmental Influences on Water Quality, Co-Director of the Prairie Climate Centre, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, and Co-Chair of the Master in Environmental and Social Change program. She and her research team are trying to unravel the relationships between water and nutrient cycling to understand how patterns and processes vary across the landscape and how human activities influencethe surface waters that drain forested ecosystems.
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${name} Ed Cloutis
Email: e.cloutis@uwinnipeg.ca

Environmental monitoring; remote sensing; spectroscopy; mineral exploration; planetary exploration
Ed Cloutis is Director of the Centre for Terrestrial and Planetary Exploration (C-TAPE) and a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg. He is an engineer and geologist, and his research includes environmental monitoring, mineral exploration, and planetary exploration.
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${name} Alan Diduck
Email: a.diduck@uwinnipeg.ca

Public participation, environmental governance, impact assessment, social learning, social sustainability
Alan Diduck is a retired Professor, former Department Chair, and Adjunct Professor in Environmental Studies and Sciences at the University of Winnipeg. Alan is trained as a lawyer and geographer, and his research deals with community engagement in environmental governance, the learning implications of involvement and the consequences for social aspects of sustainability, such as adaptive capacity and environmental justice.
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${name} Jean-Pierre Desforges
Email: j.desforges@uwinnipeg.ca

Environmental toxicology; wildlife health; energy budget modeling; cell culture; marine mammals
Jean-Pierre Desforges is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at the University of Winnipeg. His research is broadly focused on understanding the effects of human-made stressors on wildlife. A particular focus is on environmental contaminants and how the accumulate and exert adverse health effects in marine mammals.
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${name} Matt Dyce
Email: m.dyce@uwinnipeg.ca

Cultural geography; environmental history; political ecology; social studies of science
Matt Dyce is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the Univeristy of Winnipeg. He specializes in the history and geography of Western Canada.
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${name} Patricia Fitzpatrick
Email: p.fitzpatrick@uwinnipeg.ca

Impact assessment; follow-up, monitoring & adaptive management; corporate social responsibility; public engagement; mining; energy
Patricia Fitzpatrick is a Professor in the Department of Geography, and an Instructor in the Master’s of Development Practice – Indigenous Focus - at the University of Winnipeg. As a resource management geographer, she is concerned with what we can do to better manage our resources, and in turn, foster resilient and healthy communities? To this end, Dr. Fitzpatrick’s research focuses on different aspects of environmental governance surrounding energy and mining development in Canada.
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${name} Srimathie Indraratne
Email: s.indraratne@uwinnipeg.ca

Soil contamination, toxic trace elements, organic and inorganic amendments, clay mineralogy, bioavailability of metals
Srimathie Indraratne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at the University of Winnipeg. She is a soil mineralogist working on environmental issues of contamination and remediation of soil and water by heavy metals.
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${name} Darshani Kumaragamage
Email: d.kumaragamage@uwinnipeg.ca

Phosphorus, soil, water quality
Darshani Kumaragamage is a Professor in Environmental Studies and Sciences at the University of Winnipeg. She has a BSc in Agriculture and a PhD in Soil Science with over 30 years of teaching and research experience at the University level. She has an active research program at the University of Winnipeg focusing on reducing phosphorus loadings to water bodies through better management practices.
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${name} Jay Maillet

Boreal forest; climate change; dendroclimatology; forest carbon
Jay Maillet is an instructor in Geography. He is passionate about teaching and most enjoys facilitating open-inquiry or experiential learning in the field. He is currently building capacity for dendroclimatological research with the goal of assessing the impacts of climate change on forest ecosystems in the Canadian boreal.
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${name} Christopher Storie
Email: c.storie@uwinnipeg.ca

Remote sensing, geomatics, neural networks, big data, HPC
Dr. Storie is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography. He is a geomatics specialist working in the areas of GIS, satellite image analysis, big data, high performance computing and deep learning for image segmentation. His research focuses on the application of deep learning models for land cover mapping as well as other specialized applications at the confluence of geomatics and applied computer science.
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${name} Jacques Tardif
Email: j.tardif@uwinnipeg.ca

Tree rings, forest disturbances, climate change, wood anatomy, extreme climate events, dendrohydrology, dendroclimatology, dendroecology
The research interests pursued in by my laboratory are centered on understanding forest dynamics and how trees and other plant species are responding to both small and large scale forest disturbances. We use tree-ring analysis to reconstruct forest disturbances and to analyze the response of trees to these agents of change and wood anatomy to study the impact of climate on tree growth. Searching Manitoba for old living and dead trees and studying the ecology of tree species reaching their northern distribution limit are also major research activities of our laboratory. Understanding how todays’ climate extremes affect tree-ring formation allows to reconstruct in time the frequency of these climatic events given we find old trees.
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${name} Marc Vachon
Email: m.vachon@uwinnipeg.ca

Architecture and revitalization, housing, urban planning
Marc Vachon is the Principal Editor of the Canadian Journal of Urban Research (CJUR) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg. He is an urban geographer and his research focuses on architecture and city planning, housing (condo & micro-condo), urban and community planning, and avant-garde movement of the 20th century.
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${name} Richard Westwood
Email: r.westwood@uwinnipeg.ca

Richard Westwood is a Professor in the Environmental Studies and Sciences Dept. and the Biology Dept. His research focuses on a wide variety of environmental issues including conservation and protection of threatened and endangered insects and plants in prairie and boreal forest ecosystems, impacts of commercial forestry activities on forest biodiversity, improved urban tree health and protection techniques in urban forests and management of forest pests in commercial forestry landscapes.
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Adjuncts

Ian Mauro

Climate communications, climate adaptation, risk assessment, knowledge mobilization, community-based participatory research, Indigenous and local knowledges
Ian Mauro is a Professor in Environmental Studies and Director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at the University of Victoria
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