Mathieu Feagan
Ecological consciousness, different ways of knowing, transdisciplinary capacity building, climate just futures, emancipatory pedagogies.
current highlights: Ѳٳis the Principal Investigator on the New Frontiers In Research Fund - Exploration project entitled, "Just transitions as consciousness change: Learning with front-line communities," which brings together Indigenous, migrant, and settler community organizing struggles in Southern Ontario, Phoenix, and Bogotá to develop new intersectional frameworks for bottom-up approaches to just transitions. Matt continues developing an active research program around using different ways of knowing to advance just transitions towards sustainable and equitable futures. His most recent publication on co-producing new knowledge systems through diverse stakeholder collaborations was recently featured here. On March 7 2025, Matt co-hosted a session with Indigenous colleagues and KI's Anti-Oppression Knowledge Integrators working group (AOK) posing the question: why does anti-oppression work at the University of ݮƵ matter to you? With Dr. Leslie Wexler and former PhD student Julia Burke, Matt has a new manuscript accepted for publication in a special issue of the journal New Directions in Teaching and Learning, entitled “Weaving Indigenous and Western Knowledges as a Relational Approach to Decolonize Climate Complexity Education.” This publication is part of the outputs emerging from the Two-Row learning sessions hosted by the Department of Knowledge Integration in the fall of 2023. Moreover, Matt continues to attract new research funding, with two more small grants from the Climate Institute and from the Robert Harding & Lois Claxton Humanities and Social Sciences Endowment fund. Matt continues to be active in supporting other climate justice efforts at the University of ݮƵ, including the Envigorate Environmental Festival, where he participated as a panelist sharing reflections on “Climate Optimism: Perceptions vs. Realities,” and he recently gave an invited talk at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, where he hopes to develop new research collaborations on knowledge co-production for sustainability and justice.
Rob Gorbet
Interfaces. Physical interfaces, interfaces between disciplines, interfaces between people. Interface design; interactive artworks; human interaction in collaboration, teaching, and learning.
current highlights: Dzreturned to the art & design retreat to deliver a workshop this past August, for 11 early- and mid-career designers from across Europe. In early 2025, he and the team at the installed their latest testbed, , at the Delft Science Centre (DSC) at partner campus, TUDelft. The LASG is also expanding the dissemination of STEAM creativity kits via our partnership with the DSC. Rob continues to produce the , now in its third season. He’s excited to be part of the recently-awarded €4.2M Horizon EXPLORA grant, to create a doctoral network studying the development of perceptual models for how humans make sense of dynamic, immersive spaces during active exploration. Interested folks can download many of the LASG publications about our work on our .
Katie Plaisance
Philosophy of science, philosophy of the human behavioral sciences, interdisciplinary collaboration, interactional expertise, and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).
current highlights: Katie began leading ݮƵ’s contribution to a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant in May 2024. The project provides graduate students across Canada with foundational skills training and community-based experiential learning opportunities. Katie has also worked with Sandra Lapointe, the project PI, to develop a new tool for skills literacy and articulation that is being used as part of the training. Katie also continues to lead her SSHRC Insight Grant project on fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in the humanities and STEM. The most recent phase of this project included a large-scale survey of over 2,000 scientists and engineers across Canada and the US regarding their views towards and experiences with interdisciplinary collaboration. On the educational leadership front, Katie continues to engage in research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and initiatives to improve teaching and learning at ݮƵ and beyond. She recently in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning that assessed the effectiveness of INTEG 210: Making Collaboration Work. Katie and her co-authors found improvements in students’ attitudes towards diversity in teams, their beliefs about the value of teamwork, and their ability to cultivate psychologically safe teams. (Note that this course is offered by KI every fall and is open to all 2A+ students at UW.) Katie also been working with Carrie Mitchell in Planning to pilot WiSER@ݮƵ: Wellbeing in Student Education and Research, which is being supported by a 2024 UW LITE grant. In June 2024, WiSER offered training workshops for faculty in Planning and KI to incorporate evidence-based practices that enhance belonging, wellbeing, and equity amongst undergraduate students; these practices were co-developed by WiSER’s third member, Dr. Christine Logel in Social Development Studies at Renison.
Vanessa Schweizer
Collective decision-making. This includes many processes such as articulating aspirations and values, exercising foresight, confronting uncertainties and risks, and negotiating tradeoffs.
current highlights: ղԱcontinues to co-lead (with Prof. Eric Croiset, Chemical Engineering) a Climate Action and Awareness Fund project (managed by ECCC) on dynamic adaptive policy pathways for direct air capture deployment in Canada. The 2024 phase of the project included two online scenario workshops with international experts on direct air capture. Related to this project, Vanessa was an invited panelist at the Fall 2024 American Geophysical Union session on Scaling Potentials of Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies. Additionally, two of Vanessa’s trainees lead-authored publications. In May 2024, PhD student Stephanie Rose Cortinovis (co-supervised with Prof. Neil Craik) lead-authored a publication in the journal Frontiers in Climate regarding the configuration of the Canadian regulatory environment for carbon sequestration and direct air capture. In February 2025, PhD student Kasra Motlaghzadeh lead-authored a publication in the journal Communications Earth & Environment about how the incorporation of equity principles into the Paris Agreement of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change might double the carbon-dioxide removal obligations of high-emitting countries such as Canada. As part of the author team for the latter article, Vanessa was an invited panelist on the webinar series hosted by the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. With trainees in the ݮƵ Climate Intervention Strategies Lab, Vanessa co-organized two sessions for the 2024 Earth Systems Governance Forum on insights from carbon removal projects (also with Fraunhofer ISI in Germany) as well as managing a breach of the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 °C. Vanessa also co-authored a Comment in Nature Communications regarding accelerating progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and a chapter in the white paper “A guide to anticipation: Working Paper on Tools and Methods or Horizon Scanning and Foresight” published by the International Science Council. s" to further develop the nascent Mathematics for Climate Change pan-Canadian network.
KI students are involved in a wide range of research at the undergrad level, for example:
- Each student does a senior project as part of their BKI degree
- Ariane Wilson's final paper, “Quantum Bayesianism – Embracing Subjectivity in Science”, which she wrote for a course on The Philosophy of Quantum Theory was awarded the Angus Kerr-Lawson Essay Prize in Philosophy from the University of ݮƵ, and appeared in Issue 11 of The Rational Enquirer.
- Hannah Gardiner, 4th year KI student, presented her paper “Academic Writing and Standard English” at the Scholarship of Undergraduate Literary Studies (SOULS) in March 2019 at Bishop’s University in Quebec. She notes that "As a KI student – and neither an English minor nor major – being asked to present an English essay is not only an honour, it also supports the notion of an interdisciplinary education: that one need not focus their studies exclusively in one discipline to be able to meaningfully contribute as a young scholar."
- Chloé St. Amand, 4th year KI student, was a Student Moderator at the 2018 Latornell Conservation Symposium, a large, three-day conference/symposium with several hundred attendees from academia, the government, and private sectors. This 2018 theme is "Land to Great Lakes - Relationship Status: It's Complicated". Her experience at the symposium complements her studies in Knowledge Integration and Earth Sciences, specializing in Hydrogeology.
- Bronwyn McIlroy-Young, BKI'18 presented at the 2018 congress of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS). The congress in Halifax, NS, is an annual meeting of Canadian scientists and other professionals focused on atmospheric, ocean and earth sciences. She was invited by CMOS to present a poster of her KI senior research project on Canadian TV weathercasters and climate change communication.
- Thomas Huijbregts BKI'15, continued working on his KI senior research project after he graduated, and the paper he wrote about it was accepted for publication at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces. His paper is entitled "TalkingTiles: Supporting Personalization and Customization in an AAC App for Individuals with Aphasia", and he travelled to Madeira, Portugal to attend the conference.
- Bronwyn also presented at the Feminist Epistemologies, Methodology, Metaphysics, and Science Studies (FEMMSS 2016) conference at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She presented her research on gender diverse people in social epistemology, research which originated in a paper that she wrote for the KI core course INTEG 221: The Social Nature of Knowledge.
- Georgia Lamarre BKI'16 and Akanksha Madan BKI'16 presented at the Science of Team Science Conference in 2016 in Phoenix. They discussed the research they did with Katie Plaisance (Associate Chair, Knowledge Integration) on a number of projects to improve knowledge, skills and understanding of collaborative practices at the University of ݮƵ.
- Alexandra Olarnyk BKI'15 had her Knowledge Integration senior research project work, "You're Totally on Your Own": Experiences of Food Allergy on a Canadian University Campus, published in the Universal Journal of Public Health.
- Cynthia McLauchlan BKI’14 presented her KI research project “Does taking a statistics course improve statistical literacy?" at the Statistical Society of Canada annual conference in 2014.
- Eric Kennedy, BKI’12 presented at the International Conference on the Public Communication of Science and Technology in Florence, Italy in 2012. He shared research connected to his KI senior research project, which investigated the nature of short-term, project-based collaboration between scientists and Indigenous communities in Canada.
- Kaleigh Eichel, BKI’12 went to the 2012 International Polar Year Conference "From Knowledge to Action" in Montreal, to present her KI senior thesis: "Conveying polar research to the public through audio podcasting." She also attended Congress 2012 of the Humanities and Social Sciences in ݮƵ to present her KI senior research project at the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, "Conveying polar research to the public through audio podcasting" and to present an independent studies project at the Canadian Association of Geographers, "Nutrient uptake and primary productivity responses to experimental nutrient enrichment in small shallow, tundra ponds."
- Trystan Goetze BKI'12 has presented his research, and will be presenting work from his KI senior research project at the Communities of Integration conference in June 2013, during the workshop on Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE).