About Me

I'm an Assistant Professor at York University in their Disaster and Emergency Management program, where my work focuses on wildfire. I'm also interested in - and work on - issues surrounding emergency medical services, aviation safety, and catastrophic flooding (e.g., levee failures). I'm especially interested in how agencies and responders make decisions under high degrees of uncertainty, and how they work together (or don't!) to facilitate better outcomes.

I'm trained in Science & Technology Studies and qualitative methods, although my work is quite interdisciplinary. My core research these days is on wildfire policy in Canada: How does fire management differ province to province; how do management organizations 'know' fire (and the things they need to protect); and how might we balance conflicting pressures from the public, industry, and government? I've also worked on fisheries management, boundary organizations, and citizen science (I have a book on that).

​I teach classes on qualitative methods (including surveys, interviews, and research design), science policy, and science and society. Most notably, I organize and teach an annual 8-day bootcamp for graduate students from across Canada (called Science Outside the Lab), which runs in Ottawa & Montréal each May.