Liette Vasseur

Dr. Vasseur is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Brock University where she is also a member of the Women and Gender Studies program and the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (note however inactive since on sabbatical July 1st, 2018 until June 30, 2019). Since 2014, she holds the UNESCO Chair on Community Sustainability: From Local to Global at Brock (renewed 2018).

Her research program is highly interdisciplinary and links issues such as community-based ecosystem management, climate change adaptation and resilience and sustainable agriculture. She works in China, where she is a visiting scholar at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Her work in Ecuador focuses on the community sustainability and ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change of rural native communities in the Andean region of the Chimborazo.

Her community-research work with the City of greater Sudbury led her to receive in 2011 the Latornell Pioneers Award from Conservation Ontario. She has produced over hundred publications and more than 200 presentations as a researcher.

Since June 2018, she is the President of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, where she was previously Chair of the Sectoral Commission on Social, Human and Natural Sciences. She is the vice-chair for North America on the steering committee of the Commission for Ecosystem Management at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and leads the thematic group on Ecosystem Governance. Dr. Vasseur is also the Past-President (President from 2014 to2018) of the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology.