Team

Resilient Coasts Indicators Team, (Left to Right) Greg, Michelle, Jackie, Stephanie Chang, Tugce, Christopher

Resilient Coasts Indicators Team: (Left to Right) Greg Oulahen, Michelle Marteleira, Jackie Yip, Stephanie Chang, Tugce Conger and Christopher Carter

 

Coastal Indicators Project

Stephanie Chang Ph.D

Dr. Chang is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada, with the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) and the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES). She has held a Canada Research Chair in Disaster Management and Urban Sustainability (Tier 2, 2004-2013). Dr. Chang has published extensively on the socio-economic impact of natural disasters, modeling disaster losses, urban risk dynamics, critical infrastructure systems and interdependencies, economic evaluation of disaster mitigations, and disaster recovery. She has served on the U.S. National Research Council’s Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences and its Committee on Earthquake Resilience – Research, Implementation, and Outreach.

 

Jackie Yip

Jackie is a doctoral student at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability (IRES) at UBC. Her background is in Meteorology (MSc) and Environmental Science (BSc and honours). As a research assistant for this MEOPAR project, her role focuses on methodological development and data analysis and collection. For her PhD dissertation research, she collaborates with the City of Vancouver to develop and apply a new approach to identify socio-economic impact scenarios of sea-level rise and coastal flooding.

 

Tugce Conger

Tugce is a doctoral student in Resource Management and Environmental Studies (RMES) program at UBC and has an undergraduate and a masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning with a focus on urban place making.  Her role in this MEOPAR project is focused on natural and environmental indicators and variables .  Her personal research is on green infrastructure for coastal resilience to storm flooding and sea level rise in the Salish Sea Region.

 

Greg Oulahen

Greg Oulahen is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Stephanie Chang in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. Greg’s postdoctoral research investigates institutional factors that influence peoples’ vulnerability to coastal hazards in communities on the Strait of Georgia. Greg completed his PhD in Geography at Western University under the co-supervision of Dr. Gordon McBean and Dr. Dan Shrubsole, where his research was supported by SSHRC and the Coastal Cities at Risk project. His doctoral research investigated how factors related to societal structural forces, human agency, and place interact to produce unequal vulnerability to flood hazards in Metro Vancouver.

 

Rebecca Chaster

Rebecca was born and raised in Metro Vancouver, completed her undergraduate degree in Human Geography at UBC and today is  a MA (Planning) candidate at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Rebecca’s role on the MEOPAR project is to to gather data for and build the database of vulnerability indicators, and has also researched the creation of appropriate vulnerability indicators for Canada’s coast. Her individual research focuses on sea level rise adaptation and local government capacity to increase resilience to climate impacts.

 

Christopher Carter

Christopher Carter is a masters student in the School of Community and Regional Planning(SCARP) at UBC. He has completed an Bachelor of Science in geography, social anthropology and film at Montana State University – Bozeman,  is actively engaged in filmmaking and action research with indigenous and agricultural communities in world regions and serves on the 2015-16 United Nations University working group on the Warsaw Mechanism for Loss and Damages. Christopher contributes visual communications, public engagement and qualitative approaches to understanding social and economic vulnerability to the MEOPAR project. His personal research focuses on social vulnerability and disaster resiliency of place approaches to Integrated Flood Hazard Management Planning(IFHMP) in the coastal flood prone community of Squamish British Columbia.

 

Michelle Marteleira

Michelle studied Public Affairs and International Policy Management at Carleton University from 2007-2011. After finishing her degree, Michelle spent three years working with environmental and agricultural sustainability organizations in Bolivia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. She is currently a Masters of Planning student at UBC, and has focused her research on international disaster management and community resilience. As a MEOPAR researcher, Michelle is overseeing the social demographic indicators of the Hazards Vulnerability Similarity Index.

 

Emily Gray

Emily is currently pursuing her master’s degree in planning with the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Geography from UBC through the Environment and Sustainability stream, which led her to a series of jobs in environmental planning and education. With her master’s, Emily will be focusing her research on the vulnerability of different communities and how they adapt and respond to natural hazards and disasters. Her role in the MEOPAR project is to gather data for and help to build a knowledge library of the tools that communities use in coping with coastal hazards.