Much of the work below takes place through the Toronto Climate Observatory (TCO), which I lead. The TCO is a community of interdisciplinary scholars from across all three University of Toronto campuses developing new approaches to climate informatics.

This is a partial list of current activities. Refer to my Google Scholar Profile for a complete list of publications.

Climate Data and Governance in the Greater Toronto Area

I convened a team of faculty and graduate students to conduct design research into user needs for climate impact data across the Greater Toronto Area, and received a grant from the City of Toronto to track progress building resilience to climate impacts. The work has produced studies of the role of climate data in local government, in local climate activism, and in transportation planning, along with a policy brief on how local governments use climate data for program design and evaluation. In a separate collaboration with Environmental Defense Canada and Stand.earth, we analyzed and published a report on the climate emissions supported by the investments made by Toronto’s finance industry, which is widely recognized as a major polluter. That report directly catalyzed the passing of a Toronto City Council motion aimed at addressing the problem. We are also working with the Clean Air Partnership on public flood data for Southern Ontario.

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Human-Centered Design for Weather and Disaster Risk Communication

Historically there was a relatively tight loop between the experts who model and forecast severe weather and a discrete set of experts in emergency management and broadcast meteorology who could reliably translate those model outputs into guidance for the public. This is no longer the case. Today the public directly accesses information products through the web and social media that were never designed or produced with non-expert audiences in mind. With funding from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I designed and executed a study of the information needs and seeking behaviour of the public around hurricane risk, using interviews, think-alouds, and mental model elicitation. It produced actionable steps that NOAA is now implementing in its digital risk communication strategy. A subsequent SSHRC-funded study, conducted with York Emergency Management and a Toronto blind service organization, examined the severe weather information needs of people with visual impairments. We are extending this work to people living with chronic illnesses that make them susceptible to extreme heat.

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Infrastructuring Informal and Community-Based Responses to Disaster

During times of crisis, impacted communities demonstrate remarkable creativity and innovation in their use of mobile technologies. These informal responses are often overlooked by the researchers and designers developing emergency management technology, and are unaccounted for in the preparations of government and formal disaster responders. I was completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and through participant observation and oral history interviews I documented the work practices and technology use of New York City mutual aid organizers during that period, publishing one of the first academic studies of these activities. Later work in this area has improved the design of damage and impact assessments, examined whether open data projects meet community needs, and studied the informal logistics work that mutual aid organizations undertake. Since 2021 I have worked with collaborators and community organizations in Puerto Rico, where community-level action is a necessary but largely unsupported part of all crisis response.

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Critical & Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Disaster and Climate Informatics

Calls for interdisciplinary collaboration towards climate action and other so-called “wicked problems” have been made for decades. Such collaborations are argued to reveal hidden assumptions, novel approaches to complex problems, or framings that would not be apparent within a single field. Despite this potential, interdisciplinarity in practice remains difficult and is often unsuccessful. My research here contributes to understanding how to facilitate interdisciplinary work in climate change and disaster informatics, and how to evaluate what comes out of it. As one example, I worked with collaborators to organize two month-long interdisciplinary Field Labs on climate change data in Chiang Mai and Kathmandu, each attended by more than 150 scholars, practitioners, and students from fields as diverse as machine learning, urban planning, hydrology, anthropology, art, and design. A related strand argues for taking history seriously in HCI, attending to the contexts that shape how crises unfold rather than studying only the moment of disaster.

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Accounting for Equity in Disaster and Climate Risk Modeling

The adoption of data science and machine learning within climate and disaster research stands to improve our collective ability to evaluate and mitigate risk. These early experiments have not gone without problems, however, including a high-profile case of an AI consulting firm misleading governments about its products and a major earthquake prediction paper undergoing retraction. To intervene in this situation I obtained funding from the World Bank to host a working group of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of data science and disaster and climate risk management. I recruited over 60 participants and organized presentations, reading groups, and writing activities aimed at identifying the major challenges to responsible application of machine learning in the field, publishing the findings as the first industry report on the topic. With later funding from SSHRC and the Data Sciences Institute, our team identified and evaluated 73 risk assessments conducted by major international development organizations over the last decade, and found that very few account for equity effectively.

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Peer Production and the Sustainability of Open Geospatial Data

Before starting my PhD I helped found the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and launched the Open Data for Resilience Initiative at the World Bank. Both depended on volunteers producing geospatial data that institutions could rely on, and both raised a question I have continued to work on since: what makes an open mapping community durable enough to be depended upon. My research in this area examines how contributors enter and leave OpenStreetMap, what happens when corporate editing teams begin working alongside volunteers, and how the project negotiates tensions between openness, membership, and policy. A 2026 SSHRC Insight Grant, Sustaining the Map: A Mixed-Methods Intervention for OpenStreetMap Contributor Retention ($465,062), moves this work from description toward intervention.

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