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Biography

Jill Baumgartner is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar who is jointly appointed in the and the at McGill. Baumgartner's research focuses on evaluating energy transition; on measuring the health impacts of people’s exposure to environmental hazards including air and water pollution; and evaluating policies to address these factors with a focus on low- and middle-income countries including China, Colombia, India, and Ghana. Baumgartner holds graduate degrees in population health and environment from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University. She has published over 65 scientific articles in journals including PNAS, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, and the Lancet and holds a career award with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

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Trottier Fellowship

Health, health inequality and environmental sustainability in cities

My research as a Trottier Fellow aims to inform how cities across different socioeconomic and geographic settings can improve urban health and environmental sustainability, and to reduce health inequalities. While urban residents tend to have better health than their rural counterparts on average, massive within-city environmental, economic, and health inequalities are well-documented and increasing in many cities. Leveraging unique data from five major world cities (Vancouver, London, Beijing, Accra, and Dhaka) from the Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities project (), my project will assess the health characteristics of the poorest urban groups compared with the wealthiest, and evaluate which diseases contribute the most to inequalities in urban life expectancy in our study cities. We will also apply locally-parameterized models to simulate the likely population health effects of policy scenarios for each project city. This work will be done in close collaboration with a global team of researchers and with local societal partners from government and civil society in each of our project cities.

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Biography

Christian Genest is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Stochastic Dependence Modeling. His research interests include multivariate analysis, extreme-value theory, and nonparametric statistics. He has published extensively on these topics and has gained worldwide recognition as one of the earliest promoters of, and most prolific contributors to, an innovative approach to multivariate data analysis called copula modeling. The inference techniques and decision making tools he has developed have found numerous applications in finance, insurance, hydrology, and risk management. His work has been widely cited and recognized by his peers through the Statistical Society of Canada’s Gold Medal (2011) and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung’s Forschungspreis (2019). Dr. Genest was President of the Statistical Society of Canada (2007-08) and Chief Editor of the Canadian Journal of Statistics (1998-2000) and the Journal of Multivariate Analysis (2015-19). He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1996), the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1997), and the Royal Society of Canada (2015).

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Trottier Fellowship

Space-time modeling of extreme events with environmental applications

Through the Trottier Public Science Policy Program, Dr. Genest and his research team will intensify and expand their recent interdisciplinary collaborative efforts to develop and apply statistical methods to study and model the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall, spring floods, sanitary sewer overflows and other water-related catastrophic events over spatial domains with a view to inform public policies and design mitigation/protective measures in the face of climate change. Motivation for this work stems in part from the massive fluvial spring floods that occurred around Montréal and in other areas of southeastern Canada in Spring 2017 and 2019, which caused costly damages to residents and infrastructures and recently led the Québec Government to request an update of the flood hazard maps through the Info-Crue Project. Dr. Genest’s work on these and other precipitation-related hazard-management issues, will be rooted in extreme-value theory, whose probabilistic framework is ideally suited for the assessment of the risk and amplitude of catastrophic events but which needs to be extended to account for processes which they are driven by global phenomena affecting many locations over time. Software and other practical data-analytical tools will also be developed to assist cities and governments, public utility companies, and industries in managing equipments, designing protective measures, and developing policies to ensure economic stability and safeguard public health.

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Biography

Natalya Gomez is an Assistant Professor at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and is a Canada Research Chair in the Geodynamics of Ice Sheet - Sea Level interactions. Dr. Gomez received the 2019 American Geophysical Union Early Career Cryosphere Award for significant contribution to cryospheric science and technology. She is a contributing author to the upcoming United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report used to motivate and inform international climate policies, and sits on the World Climate Research Project’s Grand Challenges Steering Team on Regional Sea Level Change and Coastal Impacts. A geophysicist and climate scientist, she focusses on developing novel numerical modeling tools and monitoring systems to study the interactions between ice sheets, sea level and the solid Earth and seeks understand how these systems evolve in response to past, present and future climate changes. Her research informs our understanding of the processes governing the stability of the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in a warming climate and improves projections of future sea level rise that are used to inform policies on adaptation efforts in coastal areas around the world.

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Trottier Fellowship

A transformatively accessible water level monitoring to inform Canadian coastal adaptation policies

Future sea-level rise in our warming climate poses a threat to coastal communities and environments around the world. Sea-level change will differ from location to location due to the many contributing physical processes, and policies driving adaptation efforts must also vary, depending on the local rate of projected sea-level rise and the unique political and socioeconomic conditions of each coastal community. The objectives of my fellowship are to develop and pilot transformatively accessible instrumentation systems to densely and affordably monitor changing water levels in any environment or remote location, and to motivate widespread community adoption of these systems. Resulting measurements will inform policies on how to adapt to the changing climate in river, lake and ocean-coastal regions across Canada, especially in remote regions of the Arctic where changes are taking place at an accelerated rate and monitoring systems are sparse. Participatory interactions, coupled with these novel systems, could enable communities in remote locations to monitor their environments themselves, inform their own climate change adaptation actions, and contribute to the global body of information on changing sea levels.

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Biography

Nigel T. Roulet is a Distinguished James McGill Professor of Biogeosciences and Chair of the Department of Geography, Ï㽶ÊÓƵ. He was the Director of the McGill School of Environment (2003 – 2008) and the Director of the Centre for Climate and Global Change Research (1996-2002) and the Director of the Global Environmental and Climate Change Research Centre (2011-2014) at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ. He became the Chair of the Department of Geography in 2014 and is continuing until 2024. He has served in various grant and scholarship review panels for Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Nigel’s research interests focus on the interactions among hydrology, climatology, and ecosystems processes in peatlands and forested catchments of the temperate, boreal, and arctic regions. He was a contributing author to the 2nd through 4th scientific assessments of climate change by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He served as a member of the Ontario Far North Act Science Advisory Panel from 2010 to 2014. He is currently an Associate Editor of Global Biogeochemical Cycles and Ecosystems. In 2014, Nigel was elected to the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada.

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Trottier Fellowship

Development of simulation tools to address land-use changes in a world where climate is changing

The overall objective of my Trottier Institute for Science and Public Policy fellowship is to develop the simulation tools to address how land-use and climate change may affect the large amount of biospheric carbon stored in peatlands. To obtain this objective I will attempt to answering the following questions: What affect would landscape scale changes in hydrology have for the maintenance in the C stored in peatlands complexes of northern Canada (e.g. the Hudson Bay Lowlands)? For peatlands that have been damaged or altered, what is required to reverse the C loss and re-establish long-term CO₂ sink potential while minimizing their CH₄ sources? Are there better practices that can be developed in utilizing peat as a resource that would minimize the net change in C balances? To address these question we plan to use the McGill Wetland Model (MWM), the Extraction-Restore Holocene Peatland Model (ER-HPM), and the CoupModel. We will develop scenarios of land-use and climate change with our policy related partners from government agencies, non-governmental organizations and the private sector depending on the problem being addressed. The outcomes of this work will be used to inform land-use and climate change policy.

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