People
A community of researchers
IECS brings together faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, visiting scholars, and professional staff committed to understanding the social, cultural, political, and historical dimensions of environmental change.
Director
Staff
Postdoctoral Fellows
Hannah Tollefson
Postdoctoral Fellow · 2024-2025
Hannah Tollefson's work is at the intersection of environmental, media, and infrastructure studies. She researches socio-technical systems in land, water, and labour struggles, infrastructures of energy transition, an...
Isaac Thornley
Postdoctoral Fellow · 2024-2026
Isaac Thornley is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Human Geography at UTSC, researching environmental conflict related to Canada's emerging electric vehicle battery supply chain, drawing on political ecology...
Julian Prieto
Postdoctoral Fellow
Julian Prieto, PhD, is a political scientist exploring the geopolitics of scientific collaboration, focusing on science diplomacy, scientific diasporas, and research security, with climate change and biodiversity as c...
Valerie Uher
Postdoctoral Fellow
Valerie Uher is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the IECS and the Department of Human Geography at UTSC. Her research spans environmental communication, cultural studies, labour studies, and critical resource studies. S...
IECS Researchers
Caleb Wellum
Senior Research Associate
Caleb Wellum is a historian working at the intersection of energy, culture, and political economy in the twentieth century. He is the author of Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Moder...
Hande Paker
Senior Research Associate
Hande Paker is a political sociologist who works on politics of climate and the environment, civil society, state, cosmopolitan citizenship, and political ecology. She is the author of Climate Action and Civil Society...
Max Karpinski
Senior Research Associate
Max Karpinski researches experimental environmental aesthetics, with a focus on contemporary poetry and sound on Turtle Island. He has guest edited two special issues of Canadian Literature on "Poetics and Extraction."
Sarandha Jain
Senior Research Associate · 2023-2025
Sarandha Jain is a socio-cultural and political anthropologist who completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2022. Her research examines petroleum as an infrastructure for the Indian state and society, studying pe...
Zeynep Kadirbeyoglu
Senior Research Associate
Zeynep Kadirbeyoglu is a political scientist with interests in political ecology, decentralization, local government, civil society organizations, and citizenship. She worked as a faculty member at Bogazici University...
Alevgul Sorman
Visiting Professor · Fall 2024; Spring/Summer 2025
Alevgul Sorman is an Ikerbasque Research Associate at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). Her research scrutinizes energy transitions and transformations with insights from human geography, political ecology a...
Dominique Routhier
Visiting Professor · Fall 2025
Dominique Routhier is an assistant professor at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Danish Society of Marxist Studies. His debut book, With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of...
Shaomin Zheng
Visiting Professor · January-September 2025
Shaomin Zheng is a visiting professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature, U of T, specializing in slow narrative strategies, material ecological thought, and cross-cultural intellectual exchange. Her research ex...
Isidora Cortés-Monroy
Doctoral Fellow
Isidora Cortés-Monroy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, focusing on representations of mining in Chilean and Bolivian cultural productions. She received her BA from the University of Manc...
Diogo Santos
Graduate Fellow
Diogo Santos de Jesus is a Master's candidate in Mechatronics from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. His work focuses on micrometeorology and solar radiation, urban climate dynamics, and environmental ju...
Zachary Gan
Graduate Fellow
Zachary Gan is a master's student in Human Geography at U of T. His research looks at the infrastructural politics of Canada's green transition and how resource nationalism has shaped Canada's imagination of the "gree...
Celeste Gutierrez
IECS Researcher
Celeste Gutierrez is an IECS Researcher supporting the expansion of the Climate Backtracker across multiple provinces in Canada. She is a fourth-year University of Toronto student specializing in International Develop...
Gayathri Siva
IECS Researcher
Gayathri Siva is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UTSC, pursuing a Major in City Studies. Her research looks at the intergenerational impacts of the Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka on second-generation Tamil Canadia...
Kanchan Kargwal
IECS Researcher
Kanchan Kargwal is a Graduate Researcher supporting the development of the Climate Backtracker. She is pursuing a Master of Global Affairs at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
Riya Osti
IECS Researcher
Riya Osti is an international scholar from Nepal doing a double major in International Development and Political Science. She researches urban resilience regarding climate change and is a recipient of the 2024 Sustain...
Tatiana Rios
IECS Researcher · 2024-2025
Tatiana Rios is a U of T graduate with an Honours BA in History, focusing on culture, discourse, race, and class in 20th-century American history. She is an assistant editor for Energy Humanities.
Research
Explore IECS research and initiatives.
Learn about research programs, public initiatives, and opportunities connected to the Institute.