Meet the SFU postdoctoral fellows advancing research across disciplines

Department of Geography
Area of study: Climate science

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating: 
I am an Earth scientist investigating future climate solutions. More specifically, I use Earth system climate models to better understand the climate impacts of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I find this work fascinating because I get to think about physical, biological and chemical interactions within the Earth system, as well as interactions between the planet and the people living on it.

What is your best advice for future postdocs and researchers as they embark on new projects and studies? 
Embrace the challenge and joy of learning new things!

School of Resource and Environmental Management 
Area of study: Hydrology 
Awards: SFU Indigenous-Centred Knowledge Exchange, Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Award, Liber Ero Chair Program

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating: 
My research aims to better understand future risks related to water security and aquatic life along the Central Coast of British Columbia to support land and marine management decisions. Recent advancements in Earth system models can help estimate how climate change, droughts and wildfires may affect old-growth forests and freshwater ecosystems in this region.

What do people think you do versus what you actually do? 
People might think I spend my time measuring rivers or studying rainfall. In reality, I use computer models, climate data and observations to understand how climate change affects water systems and ecological processes across large regions.

Department of Biological Sciences 
Area of study: Bioinformatics, genomics, microbial ecology, environmental microbiology, host microbiology

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
I study microbial communities: billions of organisms in soil, air, and plants that most people never think about. What draws me to this work is what genomic tools are revealing about who they are and what they actually do. Some drift through the atmosphere consuming methane. Others land on plant surfaces and shape whether plants stay healthy or get sick. We still barely understand what governs either process, and that keeps me going.

School of International Studies 
Area of study: International relations

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research examines Russia's war against Ukraine and its implications for international security and alliance politics. I am particularly fascinated by the agency of states under attack: how countries such as Ukraine, despite severe structural constraints, can shape the decisions of more powerful states, mobilize international support, and influence alliance dynamics. This challenges conventional approaches that often portray smaller states primarily as objects of great-power competition and opens new ways of thinking about international security.

What is your best advice for future postdocs and researchers as they embark on new projects and studies?
My advice is to remain curious and open to where your research takes you. We often begin with established theories and carefully designed questions, but the most interesting findings may challenge our initial assumptions. Do not be afraid to rethink your argument, learn from unexpected evidence or take your research in a new direction. A good research project should not simply confirm what we already believe; it should change, at least slightly, how we understand the world.

School of Communication
Area of study: Media arts industries, infrastructures and activisms 
Award: SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating.
"Survival Solidarities: Cross-Sectoral Collaborations in Activist Media Arts" thinks through generative possibilities for cross-sectoral collaborations within media arts sectors in Canada and the United States (US). The goal of Survival Solidarities is to imagine new relational paradigms between media artists, labourers, and media arts institutions. It directly asks how independent media arts organizations can support each other as allies and to survive in what many have deemed a current moment of arts organizational crisis. My project proposes research-oriented and creative policy interventions that will be presented as advocacy to cultural arts policymakers at municipal, provincial, and federal levels and toolkits and resources that can be used by media arts and cross-sectoral workers as they navigate unstable terrain across the media arts sector.

What is your best advice for future postdocs and researchers as they embark on new projects and studies?
Find community! You can get lost in your various writing deadlines and research appointments, but having a writing group of other researchers or postdocs can really help you keep your feet grounded.

Department of Chemistry 
Area of study: Computational Electrocatalysis

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating: 
My research focuses on modelling the electrochemical reactions of the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide to valuable chemicals for fuel cell, electrolyzer, and battery applications. Catalysts are essential for these clean energy technologies, because they lower the activation energy and increase reaction rates. However, they face major challenges in performance, selectivity and stability. I apply first-principles computational modelling to help explain the fundamental reaction mechanisms and structure-activity relationships to design more efficient catalyst materials. I'm very passionate about climate action and sustainability and I hope my research can contribute to the net zero emission goal.

What do people think you do versus what you actually do? What do you want people to know about your research?
Most people think I stand in the lab all day doing experiments. The last time I was standing in a chemical laboratory was during my Master's degree. As a computational and theoretical chemist, I model reactions on powerful supercomputers supplied by the Digital Research Alliance Canada.

Theoretical work is extremely valuable because it allows us to identify the most probable reaction pathway, offers greater mechanistic understanding and delivers design rules for material improvement and development, all things mostly inaccessible to experimental chemistry. We often collaborate with experimental scientists to gain a deeper understanding of what happens on an atomistic level, where the theoretical work is often the missing piece of the full picture.

Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology
Area of study: Cardiac tissue engineering
Award: BC Children's Hospital Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating?
My research focuses on understanding the underlying mechanisms of genetic heart diseases and identifying potential therapeutic strategies using cardiac tissue engineering models. What I find particularly fascinating is the ability to recreate aspects of a patient’s heart disease in the laboratory and use these models to study how specific genetic variants affect cardiac function. Ultimately, our goal is to advance personalized medicine by developing patient-specific models that can help identify the most effective treatment for each individual.

What is your best advice for future postdocs and researchers as they embark on new projects and studies?
My best advice is to stay curious, be open to learning, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Research rarely goes exactly as planned, so being patient and resilient is just as important as having a good research plan. I also believe that collaboration is key. Some of the best ideas come from discussing your work with people from different backgrounds. Most importantly, enjoy the process, celebrate small progress, and remember that even unexpected results can lead to meaningful discoveries.

School of Communication
Area of study: War studies
Award: Fonds de recherche du Québec Postdoctoral Fellowship

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating?
We live in a world of rising fascisms and multipolar imperialisms, where wars are contemplated or actively waged against those left vulnerable to unrestrained violence. What becomes of a people and a country when invaded by an aggressor state and forced to fight for their survival and their right to exist? I study Ukraine’s experience of invasion, asking how war acts upon sensing bodies and their environments, and how listening and sounding shape epistemologies of violence.

What do people think you do versus what you actually do? What do you want people to know about your research?
People may think I study war through the images and spectacles that reach us through our screens. But I study what those images leave out: the embodied, multisensory, and deeply traumatic experience of living through war. Here in the West, wars are often presented like reality shows viewed through the devices we carry. In the warzone, these devices can serve very different purposes, and what is seen is only a fraction of what is actually present.

Area of study: Activism, poverty, public pedagogy
Award: SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award

What do you want people to know about your research?
I have developed a unique methodology for community-based research, focused on educating the public around issues of poverty and precarious housing in Canada. I have designed and currently manage the Housing Justice Archive, which features the Housing Justice Oral History Project, a curated collection of oral history interviews with advocates, activists, and people with lived experience of dehousing.

Name a scholar (living or dead) who inspires you in your work and explain why.
I am inspired by Hannah Arendt, who reminds us of the difficult work of thinking, and the risky activity of loving the world. To love the world is to share it with those we did not choose; to love it is to preserve it for the future.

Area of study: More-than-human design; regenerative material design; human-computer interaction
Award: Regenerative Ecologies of Design & Production for European Heritage

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating: 
I do research on more-than-human design with materials, exploring considerations for their fuller lifespans beyond the everyday cycle of "buy-use-dispose". I've worked with processes like worm composting to reframe the afterlives of disposed materials as ongoing, and with freediving/scuba diving to explore kelp as a design material within local ecologies. 

I love the interdisciplinary nature of this field and how it allows me to incorporate other aspects of my life (like diving) into design research. 

What do people think you do—versus what you actually do? What do you want people to know about your research? 
More-than-human design goes beyond sustainability or designing for animals. It offers relational ways of understanding how we're continually entangled with the world around us—including technologies, animals, microorganisms, materials, and infrastructures. This area opens alternative ways of thinking and knowing, challenging the notion that “technology solves everything.” For example: What does it mean to be human within an AI-prevalent society? How does that shape ecosystems like the ocean? More-than-human thinking helps us explore questions like these. 

Area of study: Machine learning 
Award: Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Award

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating: 
My research focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to design and optimize biomaterials for selective metal binding and resource recovery. I work on an AI-enabled software platform that helps identify and improve biomaterial candidates for recovering valuable metals from mining wastewater, tailings and other complex waste streams.

I find this research fascinating because it connects advanced AI with a practical environmental and industrial challenge. What excites me most is the possibility of turning waste streams into sources of value while reducing environmental impact.

What do you aspire to accomplish during your time at SFU? 
I aspire to develop a technically promising AI platform and turn it into a commercially relevant software product for sustainable resource recovery, creating a bridge between machine learning research, biomaterial design and industry needs.

Department of Physics 
Area of study: Stochastic thermodynamics applied to biophysics

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research focuses on understanding how biomolecular machines inside living cells, such as the rotary motor ATP synthase and the transport motors kinesin, myosin, and dynein, convert energy from one form to another to operate efficiently and perform the many tasks required to sustain life. In my work, I treat these biomolecular machines as thermodynamic engines, much like a car engine, and develop theoretical models to understand how they operate. These models can then be tested against experiments or even existing experimental data. I find this particularly interesting because it connects fundamental questions in thermodynamics and statistical physics with the remarkable molecular machinery that makes life possible.

What is your best advice for future postdocs and researchers as they embark on new projects and studies?
Acknowledge that you are not a PhD student anymore. You may still have a supervisor, but at this stage of your career, you should also have a degree of independence. So do not be afraid to pursue an idea that you find interesting, even if it takes you in a direction you were not originally planning to go, or to reach out to people you think you could collaborate with. Take ownership of your research, be curious, and make the most of the opportunity!

School of Environmental Science 
Area of study: Fluvial geomorphology

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research focuses on fluvial geomorphology, the study of how rivers shape landscapes through the movement of water (in all its phases) and sediment. I am driven by a curiosity about how the world works and a desire to understand the fundamental processes that govern our environment. Through field campaigns, laboratory experiments, remote sensing and data analysis, I aim to bridge geomorphology, hydrology, ecology and cryosphere science to gain a holistic view of river dynamics. Here at SFU, I'm working on erosional mechanisms in permafrost and ice-rich environments.

What do people think you do versus what you actually do? What do you want people to know about your research?
My family always tells me I'm "playing with sand and water," and they are not far off. Although I'm not playing around in a sandbox all day, the interaction between sediment and water is what drives my research.

Area of study: Children's and Young Adult Literature; Disability Studies; Literacy 
Award: SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
I am researching how dyslexic characters are represented in non-print media (film, television, comics, video games) for children and teens. In the midst of our current literacy crisis, I am fascinated by how we culturally link literacy to intelligence. By deconstructing the representations of dyslexia in popular media for youth, my goal is to integrate aspects of disability justice into the current discussions regarding literacy in Canada and beyond.

What do you aspire to accomplish during your time at SFU?
One of my research goals is to create an online, open-access archive of dyslexic representations across media for youth. I hope that this archive can be used by educators, scholars, librarians, parents and dyslexics themselves to find materials which best reflect the dyslexic experience.

School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering 
Area of study: Neuroscience 
Awards: CIHR Canada Postdoctoral Research Award; Michael Smith Health Research Trainee Award

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research focuses on uncovering brain signatures underlying depression and treatment response using neurophysiology and brain stimulation techniques. I'm fascinated by the complexity of depression as it varies considerably at both the clinical and biological level from person to person. By understanding how different brain signals map onto specific symptoms, this insight can guide the development of more personalized, mechanism-based treatments to improve clinical outcomes.

What do you aspire to create during your time at SFU?
During my time at SFU, I hope to advance biomarker-driven approaches to understanding depression and its treatment. I hope such work can contribute meaningfully to improving the lives of people living with depression. Beyond my own research, I aim to be a supportive and kind mentor to students in the lab and help them grow as researchers in the same way others have helped me throughout my graduate studies.

School of Resource and Environmental Management
Area of study: Land surface modeling

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research explores planetary boundaries and how human activities disrupt the Earth’s natural balance. I find it fascinating that we can identify and quantify when critical environmental thresholds have been or may be crossed. Understanding these changes can help us develop strategies to reduce human impacts, mitigate environmental damage, and keep the Earth within a safe operating space for future generations.

What is your best advice for future postdocs and researchers as they embark on new projects and studies?
My best advice is to remain curious about what comes next and seek opportunities to collaborate with others. Academia can sometimes feel lonely, but building connections makes the journey more rewarding. Collaboration allows us to learn from different perspectives, support one another, and accomplish more together than we could alone.

School of Criminology
Area of study: Online extremism
Award: SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating?
I'm currently attempting to use AI to identify key components of stochastic terrorism; a form of hate speech that increases the potential for lone wolf attacks against a target group. The overall goal is to assess whether this hate rhetoric increases radicalization among its audience to a greater extent than other, less insidious forms of extremist rhetoric.

What do people think you do versus what you actually do? What do you want people to know about your research?
If you ask my partner, I'm currently undercover online, monitoring domestic extremist groups on platforms like Reddit, Discord and Telegram, like some computational spy. In reality, I scrape metadata from those sites and read posts from the safety of my home office (though I don’t mind the comparison to James Bond). Unfortunately, in my experience, extremist rhetoric is very easy to find, and some people are consuming aspects of this rhetoric without their knowledge and consent. It's never as easy to identify as people assume it is.

Area of study: Chronic pain and HIV
Award: Michael Smith Health Research BC Research Trainee & Engaged Award

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating?
My research examines chronic pain among people living with HIV, particularly how pain intersects with substance use, overdose, healthcare access, and mortality. I use linked health and clinical data to follow people’s experiences over time and identify opportunities for earlier and more coordinated care.

What do you aspire to accomplish during your time at SFU?
During my postdoctoral fellowship, I hope to establish the foundation for an independent research program focused on improving chronic pain care for underserved populations.

School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Area of study: Biological art
Awards: SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award; SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grants

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research explores how biotechnology shapes the ways we understand, value, and imagine bodies. Working across bioart, feminist science and technology studies, and tissue engineering, I use living cells, menstrual materials, biomaterials, and laboratory techniques as artistic media. I’m fascinated by the laboratory as a site of scientific knowledge and cultural storytelling, and by how creative practices can expose hidden assumptions while prototyping more equitable, embodied futures for biotechnology.

What do people think you do versus what you actually do? What do you want people to know about your research?
People sometimes think I just make strange art with blood, cells, and laboratory equipment. What I actually do is investigate how biotechnology produces cultural ideas about bodies: whose bodies matter, whose knowledge counts, and which futures get funded. I want people to know that biotechnology is never purely technical, nor is it apolitical. It carries values, histories, desires, and inequalities; artistic research can make those structures visible while imagining radically different possibilities.

Department of Earth Sciences 
Area of study: Sedimentology, ichnology, basin analysis and CO2 reservoir modeling  

Tell us about your research and why you find it fascinating:
My research focuses on evaluating the potential for carbon storage beneath east-central Vancouver Island and the adjacent Strait of Georgia. By integrating geological mapping, subsurface data, and 3D Earth models, I aim to better understand how sedimentary rocks can safely store CO₂ over long timescales. What I find most fascinating is the opportunity to combine fundamental geological research with a practical challenge that could contribute to the transition toward a lower-carbon future. 

Name a scholar who inspires you in your work and explain why. 
Rather than a single scholar, I am inspired by people who are endlessly curious and committed to learning. I admire those who show that science advances not only through brilliance, but also through persistence and daily effort.