Nadine Ibrahim

Biography: Nadine is a Lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and holds the Turkstra Chair in Urban Engineering. She comes from a cross-section of industry and academia in the areas of urban infrastructure, sustainable cities, and sustainable development. She holds a BASc (2000), MASc (2003), and PhD (2015) in Civil Engineering, and a Certificate of Preventive Engineering and Social Development, from the University of Toronto. Transcending the boundaries of Civil Engineering, she combines environmental engineering, and incorporates non-engineering fields including architecture, economics and governance. Previously, she was a post-doctoral fellow working on Engineering Education for Sustainable Cities in Africa, launching a “Sustainable Cities” course online, and piloting a Global Classroom. Her research contributes to a wide spectrum of urban engineering fields and a broad range of global cities, megacities, and most recently megaregions, appearing in leading journals including Nature Climate Change, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has been active in futures research on engineering education and co-authored a book chapter “Educating Engineers for the Anthropocene” which appeared in the State of the World 2017: EarthED: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet, published by the Worldwatch Institute in 2017. She currently chairs a special interest group on the Engineer of 2050 at the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA). For her role as the Turkstra Chair, her vision is to build a community of practice of leaders in municipal engineering and academics in urban research to offer leadership towards prospects for our future cities; and to develop urban sustainability literacy among students to motivate their technical specializations and empower them to traverse beyond their disciplines to create liveable futures. These efforts aim at increasing the role of civil engineers in urban government, and improving the career opportunities and authority of engineers in decision-making processes in cities.