Professor Ann Dale, Principal Investigator, held her university's first Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Community Development at Royal Roads University, School of Environment and Sustainability from 2004-2014. A former Trudeau Fellow Alumna (2004), she is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Science, chairs the Canadian Consortium for Sustainable Development Research (CCSDR), a Board Member of the World Fisheries Trust. and the founder of the National Environmental Treasure (the NET). Current research interests include governance, social capital and agency, biodiversity conservation, place-based and virtual sustainable communities. She is a recipient of the 2001 Policy Research Initiative Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Policy for her book, At the edge: sustainable development in the 21st century. Professor Dale is actively experimenting with research dissemination and social media, and has recently launched HEADTalks.
Research Team
MC3 draws upon a diverse partnership of university researchers, non-government organization leaders, two international institutes, and two policy agencies.
Dr. John Robinson is Executive Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative, and a professor with the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, and the Department of Geography, at the University of British Columbia. In the former role he is responsible for integrating academic and operational sustainability on UBC’s Point Grey campus. His own research focuses on the intersection of climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainability; the use of visualization, modeling and citizen engagement to explore sustainable futures; sustainable buildings and urban design; creating private/public/NGO and research sector partnerships for sustainability; and generally the intersection of sustainability, social and technological change, behaviour change, and community engagement processes. A major current project is the development of the research and partnerships programs around the new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), now under construction on the UBC campus.
Dr. Robinson is a member of the BC Hydro External Advisory Committee on Electricity Conservation and Efficiency, and the Program Committee of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, on the Board of the Sustainable Cities Foundation and the Pembina Institute, a member of the Steering Group of HELIO International, and on the Editorial Boards of the journals Integrated Assessment, Ecology and Society, Building Research and Information, and the Journal of Industrial Ecology. He is a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation and has been a Lead Author in the last three reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Dr. Nola-Kate Seymoar is the President, and CEO of the International Centre for Sustainable Cities (ICSC), an award winning institution dedicated to bringing theory into action in Canada and around the world. Dr Seymoar spearheaded the Centre's approach to creating peer learning networks to accelerate the transfer of best practices, technologies, and policies from city to city. ICSC uses participatory action research to generate and transfer knowledge and is recognized for its work in integrated long-term planning for sustainability and in building neutral knowledge collaboration across boundaries of sectors, disciplines, departments, and nations.
Dr. John Curry is an Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Planning at the University of Northern British Columbia. He has extensive Canada-wide experience working with small and medium size communities in the areas of economic, social, and ecological planning and development. Dr. Curry has worked both in the public and private sectors. In the private sector, he was President of both the Centre for Entrepreneurial Development and Curry, Curry and Associates. The latter was a Prince Edward Island firm which specialized in publishing and community economic development consulting. He was, for five years, Editor-in-Chief of Plan Canada, the professional journal of the Canadian Institute of Planners.
Dr. Mark Roseland is Director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development (CSCD) and Professor in the School of Resource and Dr. Roseland lectures internationally and advises communities and governments on sustainable development policy and planning. He chairs the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) of the Simon Fraser University Community Trust, which is responsible for the UniverCity sustainable community development project Dr. Roseland also teaches courses on sustainable community development that have focused extensively on projects such as the City of Vancouver’s model sustainable community being developed at Southeast False Creek, the SFU UniverCity project, the Vancouver-Whistler 2010 Olympic Bid, and the City of Vancouver’s proposed “sustainability precinct.”
Dr. Meg Holden (PhD in Public and Urban Policy, New School for Social Research) is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Holden teaches and researches urban sustainable development in cities around the world, with a particular focus on the interaction between measurements and accountability for implementation of sustainability innovations in policy and practice. Her writing appears in Progress in Planning, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Social Indicators Research, Applied Research in Quality of Life, Cities Journal, the Canadian Journal of Urban Research, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Economics, and Habitat International, among other venues.
Dr. Stephen Sheppard (PhD in Environmental Planning, University of California at Berkeley) teaches in sustainable landscape planning, aesthetics, and visualization in the Landscape Architecture programme and Department of Forest Resources Management at UBC. He directs the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP), a research group using perception-testing and interactive 3D visualization tools to support public awareness-building, policy change, and collaborative planning on climate change and sustainability issues. He also serves on the Steering Committee of the Design Centre for Sustainability. He has over 25 years' experience internationally as a consultant in environmental assessment, visual resource management, planning, and public participation with Dames & Moore and EDAW. He has published three books on visual simulation and aesthetics, and was a reviewer of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Recent research projects lie in visioning and communicating local climate change futures, public perceptions of sustainability, and ethical visualization techniques.
Current MC3 Investigators and Collaborators
The above page captures the historical context of the MC3 project, and the biographies displayed here include those involved in the planning and formulation of the project. The MC3 website was created and launched in the fall of last year, and the project became active in early 2012. The current research team responsible for leading the case studies, social media, online dialogue forums, and publications can be seen on the MC3 website's Who's Involved page. The team consists of Professor Ann Dale, Dr. Sarah Burch, Dr. Alison Shaw, Dr. John Robinson, Dr. Meg Holden, Dr. Stephen Sheppard, Dr. Mark Robinson, and Dr. Leslie King. Leads for each of the case study can be seen on the Case Leads page.