As a Postdoctoral Associate, I will contribute to Innovation North by serving as a lead researcher in use case projects, planning and contributing to Lab sessions, further refining the Compass, and helping package what we learn into articles aimed at both practitioner and academic audiences.

I believe systems innovation is important because no one organization can tackle our complex, intertwined ecological and social problems alone. In my past experiences taking on sustainability challenges in a variety of contexts – from an urban sustainability think tank in Chicago to circular economy research projects in Helsinki – I saw firsthand how there are no easy solutions to our grand challenges. I am particularly excited about the potential for systems innovation to bridge actors and ecosystems across scales to identify and experiment with solutions beyond the obvious.