Message from TISED’s Director

It gives me great pleasure to introduce TISED’s 2021-2022 Annual Report. Despite another challenging year brought on by the ongoing pandemic, TISED has continued to strive towards its mandate to inspire, coordinate and support innovative engineering and design solutions and intellectual capacity in sustainability at the Faculty of Engineering. With the COVID vaccines becoming readily available in Canada during summer of 2021, McGill University made the decision to return to in-person teaching for the 2021-2022 academic year. And although students and instructors returned to the classrooms, non-essential and non-pedagogical in-person campus activities were limited. As such, during the past year, our outreach activities continued primarily remotely.

TISEDTalks, our invited speaker series, consistently demonstrated strong participation and engagement from our community; we featured four speakers on topics ranging from COVID-19 related plastic waste, to circular economy and the built environment, novel energy technologies and suburban densification. Our flagship outreach event, the 8th Annual Trottier Symposium on Sustainable Engineering, Energy and Design, was hosted online on November 4th, 2021, and explored the questions of a just energy transition and the systemic, institutional, and social changes that are necessary for humanity to live within its planetary limit. Dr. Julia Steinberger and Dr. Éric Pineault laid out a challenging yet hopeful roadmap for how changes in personal behaviors can collectively effectuate an impactful transformation.

On the academic side, TISED’s SEAD courses continued to be popular with our student community; the SEAD 520 Life Cycle-Based Environmental Footprinting class saw record number enrolment in the winter 2022 semester. Furthermore, in October 2021 we launched an academic recruitment process for a professor in the area of industrial ecology and life cycle assessment, a joint appointment at TISED and one of the six departments or two schools at the Faculty of Engineering; the target start date of the new appointment is Fall 2022.

In addition, TISED’s proposal for a Master’s program in sustainability in engineering and design completed important stages of the review process. A program proposal was submitted to the Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire & Québec Ministère de l’éducation et de l’enseignement supérieur (BCI) in May 2020 and the BCI review committee conducted a (virtual) site visit in July 2021; TISED received positive feedback from the review committee in early 2022. The renovation project of the physical space designated for the future TISED Master’s program has completed the pre-design phase and went out to tender in April 2022. Project completion and move-in are expected by fall 2022.

SEDTalks! Training Program, TISED’s flagship student training initiative, continues to receive positive feedback from student participants. On March 23, 2022, the SEDTalks! Event marked the first time since the start of the pandemic that the TISED community gathered in-person to learn about some of the high calibre sustainability research carried out by our graduate students. And though some of our activities related to programs such as the Research Workshops Program and the Scholar-in-Residence have been suspended while non-essential travel restrictions remain in place, we hope these initiatives can be resumed in the coming year.

As we all look forward to returning to campus for the Fall 2022 semester, we reflect on the last decade of TISED’s accomplishments, and on the future trajectory of how TISED can contribute to the conversation on pressing sustainability issues; what are the challenges that lie ahead and how can TISED play an impactful role in turning those challenges into opportunities for positive change. As always, we strive to create research exchange opportunities for our members, delivering student support through funding and education enhancement activities and public outreach.

To a successful and healthy 2022-2023 for all,

Subhasis Ghoshal Professor and Director, Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design

Governance

TISED creates ad hoc committees and working groups for project and event-specific initiatives. TISED is in the process of finalizing its Advisory Board (Board) to guide the strategic direction of the institute; invitation to prospective Board members will be sent in the Fall of 2022 and the Board is expected to be finalized by January 2023. The first meeting of the Board will take place in Spring 2023.

Academic Staff

Prof. Subhasis Ghoshal, Director

Prof. Laxmi Sushama, Trottier Chair in Sustainable Engineering and Design

Prof. Jeffrey Bergthorson, Associate Director & Panda Faculty Scholar in Sustainability in Engineering and Design

Administrative Staff

Monika Skonieczny, Manager

Gary Ng, Research Assistant

Prof. François Bouffard, John M. Bishop and Family Faculty Scholar in Sustainable Engineering and Design

Irene Toffolo, Administrative Coordinator

Parisa Hassani, Digital Communications and Outreach Associate

New Members:

Professor Xie’s research interests lie within the broad areas of resilience, infrastructure systems, and natural hazards. His research goal is to promote hazard resilience and sustainability of infrastructure systems using advanced modelling and smart protection.

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Prof. Ignea’s research aligns with the TISED’s priority area for Sustainable Industrial Processes and Manufacturing. Specifically, engineering microbial systems for producing high-value/specialty chemicals, thus providing clean methods for the bioproduction of valuable compounds for a broad range of applications. Moreover, she engineers an artificial pathway for synthesis of new-to-nature molecules that could have improved functionalities.

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Prof Changhong’s research focuses on characterizing the mechanical properties of advanced materials to enhance the sustainabilities of their applications (energy storage in particular) as well as developing sustainable manufacturing processes from the micro-nano level, which fall under TISED’s priority areas of renewable energy and energy efficiency as well as sustainable manufacturing.

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