Contact
Department of Bioresource Engineering
Macdonald Campus, McGill University
Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec H9X 3V9
Tel.: 514-398-7784
Fax: 514-398-8387
grant [dot] clark [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Dr. Clark)
Profile
Grant grew up on a mixed farm in Central Alberta. He received an industry-cooperative B.Sc. in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Alberta, Edmonton (1993) and a Ph.D. in Biosystems Engineering from McGill University, Montreal (2000). Grant then worked as a Research Associate and Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta until coming to McGill in 2007. His research program in ecological engineering involves the use of computational tools and physical systems to study how ecosystems can be designed, created and managed so as to provide services and solutions.
Visit the website of the Ecological Engineering Research Group
Research
Ecosystem engineering is the creation of ecosystems that fulfill preconceived goals with given design constraints. Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems comprising a community of organisms and their abiotic surroundings, which might include technological components. Ecosystem engineering is thus highly interdisciplinary, requiring close collaboration with ecologists, as well as specialists in many other disciplines. The objectives in ecological engineering can be small-scale, immediate, and focused, as with the design of an industrial fermenter to produce a specific chemical, or large-scale, forward-looking, and diffuse, as with the understanding and management of the large-scale ecological changes precipitated by human population growth and resource consumption. Some of my specific areas of interest in this discipline are:
- Epistemology: The study of knowledge acquisition and representation. Definition of an epistemological framework which accommodates the characterization and engineering of ecosystems.
- Ecosystem energetics: The flow and transformation of energy through an ecosystem. Ecosystems complex adaptive systems that evolve to far-from-equilibrium states through the transformation of an input energy signature energy to low quality energy. What are the laws that underlie these dynamics? How can an understanding of such laws be used to design ecosystems that thrive in a given context while performing predetermined functions?
- Numerical modeling: The creation of a system with features which are analogous to those of interest in some other system. The creation of numerical models allows convenient testing of hypotheses about systems, such as ecosystems, on which direct experimentation might not be possible or convenient.
- Microbial ecosystems: Can be small-scale and convenient for laboratory study. We are developing fully-instrumented composting systems for use as physical models in ecological engineering research. Applications of composting include agricultural and municipal waste management, including the destruction of the variant prion protein which transmits bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease.
Courses
- BREE 252 Computing for Engineers
- BREE 490 Engineering Design 2
- BREE 495 Engineering Design 3
- BREE 501 Simulation and Modelling
- BREE 533 Water Quality Management
Links
- Ecological Engineering Research Group
- Canadian Society for Bioengineering
- American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers
- American Ecological Engineering Society