Vanessa Schweizer

Biography

Dr. Schweizer is an Associate Professor of Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo in Canada and Faculty at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is the Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, a Fellow at the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, and a Council member for the Society for Risk Analysis. Her research focuses on scenario analysis and how it can be used to structure discourse around policy or managerial decisions for sustainable development under climate change.

She also sits on the Steering Committee for the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios, which informs scenario development and its application in climate change research. She was also a Contributing Author to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Chapter 21: Regional Context of Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Vol. 2). She has held visiting or previous appointments with the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, the US National Energy Technology Laboratory, the Interdisciplinary Research Unit on Risk Governance and Sustainable Technology Development at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and a Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellowship at the US National Research Council.