Michele Koppes | Lab Director
Dr. Koppes is a Professor of Geography and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
Her research focuses on landscape response to climate change, from the current day to the long term. She is fascinated with all rates of geomorphic change, particularly the effects of glaciers and humans on the landscape and how we perceive these changes. In addition to her core scholarly interests,she is involved in creative science communication endeavours , experiential education and critical approaches to physical geography.
She holds PhD and MSc degrees from the University of Washington and a BA (Honours) from Williams College.
Personal Website: http://blogs.ubc.ca/koppes/
Email: koppes@geog.ubc.ca
Current Members | Current Research
Holly Chubb | Postdoctoral Fellow
Holly joined the lab in 2021. I am a Natural Environment Research Council PhD Candidate from Newcastle University (UK) currently hosted in the Climate and Cryosphere lab at UBC. My research surrounds the implications of climate change on high mountain hazards, focussing on contemporary examples from the Patagonian Andes and Coast Mountains. These include the 2010 Qw’elqw’elústen (Mount Meager) debris flow, 2017 Villa Santa Lucía aluvión, and 2019 N’skenú7 (Joffre Peak) landslides.
I am investigating how a degrading cryosphere is increasing the frequency and magnitude of these phenomena, with a special interest in the bulking and entrainment mechanism of catastrophic mass movement events. I want to determine we can use event signatures preserved in the geomorphological record for hazard understanding and prediction.
My research is supported by the UKRI Natural Environmental Research Council via ONEPlanet DTP, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), British Society for Geomorphology, International Association of Sedimentologists, Geologists Association, and British Sedimentological Research Group. I hold MPhil and BSc (Hons) degrees from Newcastle University.
Email: H.Chubb1@newcastle.ac.uk
Maicen Stuart | MSc Student
Maicen joined the Landscapes of Climate Change Lab in 2022. I primarily grew up north of Salt Lake City, Utah but spent most of my life moving around the United States. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin – Madison where I double majored in Astrophysics and Environmental Studies. I spent much of my time in university working in the fields of aerospace engineering and astrophysics before transitioning to environmental studies, bringing me to the Landscapes of Climate Change Lab. My research interests have sprouted from a combination of personal learned and lived experiences and through my connection and love for mountains. My research is centered on exploring the impacts of climate change on social-ecological mountain systems. Specifically, I’m interested in the ways that mountain communities are experiencing and adapting to climate change and how the scientific community engages with local perspectives of the changing environment.My Master’s research takes place and is centered in the ancestral lands of the Indigenous Sherpa communities in Khumbu, Nepal. Through methods such as bibliographic and network analysis and acoustic soundscapes, my research seeks to understand the scientific production of knowledge in Khumbu and how the scientific community has engaged and consulted with Sherpa communities and their perspectives and knowledge. I am committed to the relationships that have and will come from this research and seek to continue this work beyond my Master’s. I intend to engage with these ideas in a way that includes a diverse set of knowledge systems, and interdisciplinary contexts, and reflexively considers my own positionality.
email: maicestu@mail.ubc.ca
Joshua Kakepetum | MSc Student
Joshua joined the lab in 2023. I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba with some younger years in Red Lake Ontario. I have an honors degree in Geography from the University of Manitoba and did my undergraduate thesis looking at the spatial relationships between Arctic shipping and marine mammals in Inuit communities. My interests lay in big data, AI, and geospatial science and how they can be applied to climate change impacts for policy.
This led me to become a Jr. Science Advisor for the Canadian federal government in the national capital region, applying spatial data in the support and development of science policy in Canada.
I am now pursuing my Master of Science in Geography at UBC in the Landscapes of Climate Change lab. My current interests shifted towards geoheritage, science communication, and the co-production of knowledge. My interests in geoheritage are rooted in my passion for museums, where geoheritage is an outdoor museum showcasing beautiful landscapes, local cultures, and the natural/anthropogenic histories surrounding the region.
Currently, I am exploring geoheritage sites in South Korea and Canada with the use of GIScience, co-produced with local knowledges.
Email: joshua.kakepetum@ubc.ca
Annika Ord | MSc Student
Annika’s research seeks to learn from Indigenous and place-based knowledges to better understand how glacier loss is impacting coastal ecosystems, hazards, local food resources, and culture in communities in Lingít Aaní. There is growing concern about the impact of accelerating glacier retreat due to climate change on salmon runs. Much attention has focused on the biophysical relationship between glaciers and salmon (O’Neel et al., 2015; Pitman et al., 2020; Pitman & Moore, 2021; Shanley & Albert, 2014); however, most studies are not engaging with local communities to understand local concerns and observations of glacier change and its impacts. Through talking with indigenous communities, subsistence and commercial fishermen, resource managers and scientists, we seek to integrate local knowledge of these system linkages and identify community-based questions that can help guide future research. By exploring the relationship between glaciers and coastal systems from the people who know these lands best, most especially from those who have adapted to climate change and glacier advance/retreat for millennia, there is a unique opportunity to understand how the loss of glaciers has and will continue to impact communities and essential ways of life along this glaciated coastline.
Building from these conversations and relationships, we are working with Children of the Taku Society, an educational organization working on Tlingit language revitalisation, to support a Tlingit language immersion camp on the Juneau Icefield this upcoming summer (2024).
Previous Members
Flavien Beaud | Postdoctoral Fellow
Flavien joined the lab in 2020 as a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow. He is passionate about the processes that shape landscapes, particularly in mountainous and glaciated landscapes. His research explores ice dynamics, subglacial hydrology, glacier erosion, and sediment transport, focusing on better quantifying the interactions between these processes.
He believes that a varied approach is key to better understanding physical processes and his research involves theory and numerical modeling, as well as fieldwork and laboratory experiments.
Personal Website: http://flavienbeaud.com/
Avinash Parla | PhD
Avinash joined the lab in 2019 after completing a MSc. under the supervision of Prof. RAAJ Ramsankaran at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. His research at UBC focused on the glacier dynamics and quantification of mass loss in the Canadian Arctic, using remote sensing and optical satellite data. The aim is to utilize remote sensing technology to improve our understanding of the impacts of climate change on remote glaciers of the Canadian Arctic.
Email: p.avinash283@gmail.com
Graham McDowell | PhD
Graham successfully defended his PhD in 2020 looking at the socio-ecological dimensions of cryospheric change in high mountains. He led projects in the Nepal Himalaya, Rocky Mountains, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic as well as numerous global-scale assessments of environmental change in cold regions. Graham moved on to a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Zurich, as well as becoming the Project Leader for the Canadian Mountain Assessment, which launched in 2023.
Personal Website: grahammcdowellresearch.com
Alexandra Winter-Billington | PhD
Alex’s doctoral research is on changes to glacier mass balance and melt water generation in the Indian Himalaya given climate change. In collaboration with scholars at The Indian Institute for Science Education and Research (Pune) and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, she set up a comprehensive monitoring system at Satopanth Glacier in Uttarakhand to address the effect of extensive supra-glacial debris on energy transfers and melt, with the aim of creating a transferable, physically based model of the energy flux in supraglacial debris that will eliminate the need for laborious field work.
Matt Chernos | MSc
Matt is a Hydrologist and Data Analyst based in Calgary, AB. Matt’s master’s research explored how the presence of a lake at a glacier terminus affects the melt rate at Bridge Glacier, British Columbia. He now spends a lot of time modelling mountain hydrology for industry, government, and not-for-profit stakeholders. He likes mountains, glaciers, travelling to cool places to see more mountains and glaciers, and cool (open-source!) data analysis.
Personal Website: https://mattchernos.wordpress.com
Email: mchernos@gmail.com
Lucy MacKenzie | MSc
Although I recently completed a PhD in fluvial geomorphology at UBC, glaciers and glaciated landscapes were my first true (academic) love. In the last year of my undergrad in 2012 I completed an honours thesis under the supervision of Michele Koppes. For that project I surveyed the proglacial area of Bridge Glacier in order to develop a better understanding of the sedimentological and morphological characteristics of different deposits and the deglacial history of the area. Since then, I have switched to fluvial geomorphology and am now experimentally investigation thresholds of morphologic stability in steep channels. I completed my PhD in 2019 and am currently a working as a hydrologist for BGC in Vancouver.
Email: lucy.gmack@gmail.com
Alexis Moyer | MSc
Alexis finished a PhD in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, exploring spatial and temporal differences in iceberg melt rates along with western coast of the Greenland Ice Sheet. She completed her MSc in the lab in 2015, where her research focused on streamflow response to the retreat of a lake-calving glacier in the Southern Coast Mountains of BC. She currently is the Head of ESG & Spatial Finance at Edinburgh-based Space Intelligence, a climate-tech start-up supplying consistent, timely and accurate information to support nature-based solutions and sustainability-linked finance.
Lawrence Bird | MSc
Lawrence is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Monash University in Australia. His research focuses on sub-glacial hydrology, ice-ocean interactions, and understanding ice sheet dynamics through ice sheet modelling of ice shelves in East Antarctica. From 2014 to 2021, he was a Water Resources specialist working with Associated Environmental in Vernon, BC. He completed his MSc in the lab in 2014, focused on the hydrology and thermal regime of Bridge Lake, a proglacial lake fed by Bridge Glacier in the southern Coast Mountains.
Haley Williams | MSc
Haley’s research focused on the landscape relaxation response to rapid deglaciation in Icy Bay, Alaska. She completed her MSc program in the lab in 2018. She is currently working as a geomorphologist for BGC in Vancouver, BC and Calgary, AB.
Email: haley.williams@alumni.ubc.ca
Visiting Students
Yanfei Peng
Yanfei joined the lab in the 2021-2022 academic year as a visiting international research student from China, interested in the use of machine learning applications in remote sensing of the cryosphere. Her work focuses on the application of Physical-Informed Neural Networks to investigate ice shelf dynamics.
Email: yanfei7026@163.com
Undergraduate Research Assistants
SAMADHEE KALUARACHCHI – 2022/2023
Samadhee completed a BSc. with Honours Environmental Sciences in 2023. Her honours thesis focused on the retreat of Bridge Glacier in the Lillooet Icefield, specifically looking at the recent changes in glacier area, climate, and streamflow, including the influence of the proglacial Bridge Lake on regulating streamflow in Bridge River. She is currently
Email: samadhee@student.ubc.ca
ISAAC LOWENTHAL WALSH – 2022
MADISON BROWN – 2021
Madi completed a BSc. in Soil Science in 2021. She is interested in the relationship between glaciers and the surrounding hydrological and land systems and with the continuation of climate change how this will impact down downstream communities.
In summer 2021 she held an NSERC USRA in the lab, where she created an interactive map to identify useful data collections points, as well as resources vulnerable to glacier retreat in Coastal BC and Alaska, and contributing a blog series on “the impact of climate change on the evolution of Bridge Glacier”.
Email: madison.brown@student.ubc.ca
KELLY HURLEY – SUMMER 2020
Kelly joined the lab in summer 2020 while completing a BSc. in Global Resource Systems. She held NSERC USRA modelling contemporary glacier runoff in the Canadian Cordillera using a temperature index model, in order shed light on how regional meltwater generation has evolved in recent decades . She hopes to apply her scientific skill set towards issues of environmental justice and climate change adaptation.
ANNA KAVENEY – SUMMER 2019
NIKITA WALLIA – SUMMER 2016
JULIA NEWTON – SUMMER 2014
