Dawn Bazely

Please join us in welcoming Professor Dawn Bazely! Dawn is the 2024-2025 Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies and will teach her course "Canada's Approach to Selected Global Wicked Problems," which will cover world issues including climate change, settler-colonialism, and public health, in the Spring 2025 semester. Dawn can be found in her office, Rozenkranz Hall Room 438.

Dawn Bazely is a biology professor in York University's Faculty of Science. From 2006, she directed York’s Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability for seven years, receiving the university’s Sustainability Leadership Award, and in 2017, the title of University Professor. Bazely has worn many academic hats since joining York in 1990 and developed diverse research expertise since beginning as a grass biologist, an ongoing research area. She has studied plant-herbivore interactions for over forty years, including snow geese and St Kilda’s Soay sheep. Her Zoology doctorate from Oxford University applied economic models to sheep grazing behaviour.

Dawn’s many scholarly publications include the edited volume, Environmental Change and Human Security in the Arctic (2014). From 2006 to 2011, She led the Canadian section of the International Polar Year project, Gas, Arctic Peoples and Security. Bazely advocates for open access, excellent science communication, and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity in STEM. Her chapter, with historian, Prof. K. McPherson, on the under-appreciated contributions of women to Ontario horticulture features in Ann Shteir’s 2022 McGill-Queen’s edited volume about Canadian botany in the nineteenth century: Flora’s Fieldworkers.

Dawn has received many awards over the decades, including the Globe and Mail’s 2014 Universities Report "Hotshot Professor", and in 2022, the Ontario Minister of Colleges and Universities’ Award of Excellence for Future-Proofing Students, by leading the way in virtual teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. She is the recipient of the Royal Canadian Institute for Science’s Sandford Fleming Medal for 2022.