Associate Members

Oliver Coomes

Professor, Department of Geography. PhD, Wisconsin-Madison

Research Interests

• Environment and Development in Latin America;
• Peasant economy;
• Cultural ecology;
• Environmental conservation and economic development;
• Traditional agriculture and rainforest extraction;
• Peasant adaptation to environmental and economic change in Amazonia.

Franque Grimard

Associate Professor, Department of Economics. PhD, Princeton

Research Interests

• Economic Development;
• Labor Markets;
• Integration of Women in Labor Force;
• Credit markets and Bank Failures;
• Trade and Growth, Tax Reform;
• Côte d'Ivoire, Pakistan, Peru;
• Health Economics;
• Smoking and Low Income Households in Canada;
• Environment Economics;
• Agroforestry Practices, Sustainable Agricultural Practices.

Catherine Lu

Professor, Department of Political Science

Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, and Coordinator of the Research Group on Global Justice of the Yan P. Lin Centre. She was the Associate Director of ISID from 2016-2018. Her research and teaching interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative studies of intervention in world politics; global justice; reconciliation; structural injustice; alienation; colonial international order; cosmopolitanism; and the world state. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which won four international book awards, and Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In 2018, she was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Sonia Laszlo

Associate Professor, Department of Economics

Professor Sonia Laszlo is Associate Professor of Economics. Her research expertise covers many aspects of applied microeconomic analysis in economic development. Specifically, she is currently working in two broad research areas: decision-making under uncertainty (namely concerning technology adoption among subsistence farmers) and the micro-economic effects of social policies and conditions (in the area of education, health and labour markets), with a focus on women. Prof. Laszlo has conducted her research in Peru, Kenya and in the Caribbean, using laboratory experiments, surveys or randomized controlled trials. She is also a member of the Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en Organizations (CIRANO) and the Grupo de Analysis para el Desarrollo (GRADE). In 2005 she co‐founded and has since been an executive member of the Canadian Development Economics Study Group (CDESG), which groups both academic and policy development economists in Canada

Paola Perez Aleman

Associate Professor, Desautels Faculty of Management. PhD, MIT

Research Interests

• Economic organization and emerging governance in developing economies, particularly in Latin America;
• Institutional innovations in the private and public sectors, particularly how governments, firms and associations reshape themselves and their interactions to facilitate learning, adjustment and economic development;
• Relationships between large and small firms (multinational and local) in production networks, and the process of upgrading the capabilities of producers in developing countries to meet international productivity and quality standards.

Jon Unruh

 Associate Professor, Department of Geography. PhD, University of Arizona

Research Interests

• Recovery of war-affected societies;
• Land rights, armed conflict and development;
• Human adaptation to environmental change;
• Development dilemmas in Africa;
• Housing, land and property restitution in the Middle East;
• Large-scale land acquisitions in the developing world.

Hugo Melgar-Quinonez

 Content to come

Poulami Roychowdhury

Assistant Professor, Sociology. Ph.D., New York University

Professor Roychowdhury’s research examines the relationship between politics, law, and social inequality. Her forthcoming book, Capable Citizens (Oxford University Press), shows how political mobilization against gender-based violence has transformed ordinary women's interactions with the Indian criminal justice system. Other projects include: masculinity and labor organizing, and media coverage of sexual violence. She is currently working on two new projects. The first examines the evolution and resolution of complaints related to discrimination and harassment on university campuses in the United States. The second analyzes the dramatic fall of women's employment in India. Her research has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Institute for Indian Studies.

Juan Wang

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science. PhD, Johns Hopkins

Juan Wang is an associate professor of political science at McGill. Her research interests are state-building at the grassroots level in China. She has primarily focused on the formation, changes, and operations of local governments, religious institutions, and coercive and legal apparatus. Her research relies on qualitative methods to explore the reality, nuance, and meaning of politics in contemporary China. Her first book, The Sinews of State Power: The Rise and Demise of the Cohesive Local State in Rural China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) traces the changes and continuity of intergovernmental relations at the grassroots level to explain the varying causes of and persistent peasant protests in China.