Nadine Ibrahim, University of Waterloo

Profile photo of Nadine Ibrahim, expert at University of Waterloo

Lecturer Waterloo, Ontario n25ibrah@uwaterloo.ca

Bio/Research

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, in addition to engineerin...

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Bio/Research

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, in addition to engineering education scholarship and pedagogy. Nadine has taken an interdisciplinary approach to her education and career. Transcending the boundaries of Civil Engineering, she combines environmental engineering, and incorporates non-engineering fields including architecture, economics and governance. Most recently, 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.

She has leverages her industry experience to expand her inquiry into cities through urban and environmental projects in Canada and abroad. In Canada, she worked with municipalities in Southern Ontario on asset management, risk assessment, infrastructure planning, and capital budgeting. Her exposure to municipal engineering leadership and global industry best practices imparts transferable skills that she has excelled at, and applies them in academia to generate and seek collaborative opportunities to bring real world engineering leadership examples into the classroom and with other disciplines interfacing with engineering. Abroad, in the Middle East and North Africa, she worked in international development on high profile and large-scale projects for clients including the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility. In 2010, she received the Early Career Award, in recognition of her work in tackling global challenges in diverse communities in need, and in introducing corporate social responsibility.

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 for the future 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 in Urban Engineering, 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. Stemming from the University of Waterloo’s “Educating the Engineer of the Future” Nadine’s goals include building partnerships within the department, and with other departments and faculties, and the broader engineering community for the benefit of this urban engineering initiative and advancing engineering education.


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