Dawn Parker is Professor in the School of Planning, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on the development of fine-scale models that link the drivers of land-use change and their socioeconomic and ecological impacts, with completed and ongoing projects on organic agriculture in California’s Central Valley, timber harvest and carbon sequestration in eastern deciduous forests in West Virginia, USA, the effects of HIV/AIDS on smallholder agricultural households in Uganda, interactions between land markets, landscaping, and carbon sequestration in ex-urban landscapes, and the co-evolution of urban transit networks and residential neighbourhoods. Her areas of technical expertise include agent-based modelling, land-use modelling, and environmental and resource economics.
She received her BA in Economics from Lewis and Clark College and her PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from U.C. Davis. Shen then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in modelling with Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University. Previously to joining UW, she was a founding member of the Center for Social Complexity and Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University, USA, where she served as director for the PhD program in computational social science. She serves on the steering committee of the Global Land Project and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Land Use Science and Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems.
