Biography

I am a transdisciplinary scholar, community developer, and passionate supporter of place-based efforts to build more sustainable community economies. My scholarly pursuits are motivated by the belief that the complex problems facing our society, like climate change and rapid shifts in local economies, are best addressed by place-based solutions that combine entrepreneurial strategies with a strong grounding in holistic sustainability and social justice. Joining St. Thomas University in January 2025 in the Business and Social Entrepreneurship program, I aim to encourage students’ passion for addressing these complex problems while gaining key entrepreneurial skills and exploring social entrepreneurship as a potential career path.

I completed my doctorate in 2020 through Memorial University’s Interdisciplinary PhD program, specializing in environmental policy, human geography, and economics. My dissertation focused on sustainable development in rural and natural resource-based communities and explored tensions between indicator-based tools for assessing sustainability and storytelling approaches based in the lived experiences of rural community members. Afterwards, I held postdoctoral fellowships through the Future Ocean and Coastal Infrastructures project (based at the MUN Faculty of Business Administration) and later in the Marine Biomass Innovation project (based at Grenfell Campus, MUN). I have worked in an entrepreneurship support role at Navigate Entrepreneurship Centre, counselling early-stage entrepreneurs, facilitating start-up events and programs to enhance entrepreneurship skills, and developing partnerships with other entrepreneurship support centres in Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada.

At St. Thomas, I teach courses in the Business and Social Entrepreneurship program through an experiential and student-led approach. Believing that entrepreneurial skills are best learned by doing, I guide students in identifying their own social enterprise ideas and developing aspects of a social enterprise business model with hands-on tools and direct experience. These include skillsets such as developing a social value proposition, learning to pitch a social enterprise idea, learning from successful social entrepreneurs through guest lectures and field visits, and getting feedback from real users to inform social enterprise business model design. I have completed LEANSTACK® coach training with Ash Maurya, creator of the Lean Canvas and use the Lean Start-up method throughout my teaching.