Liette Vasseur
Canadian biologist
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Childhood and education
Vasseur was born on April 29, 1963, on a farm in Laval, north of Montreal. Her father and paternal grandfather were florists.
Liette's primary studies began in 1969 at John XXIII School and Simon Vanier School. She did her first two years of secondary school at St-Martin and finally completed her third, fourth and fifth year at St-Maxime. She did her CEGEP at Ahuntsic College.
She graduated from Sherbrooke University with a degree in biology and ecology. She graduated in 1985.
Liette then studied biology at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) where she graduated in 1987. She then worked on the conservation of wild garlic. She was able to do part of a research team at the Université de Montréal in population genetics with Jean-Pierre Simon.
She then completed her Ph.D. in biology at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) and graduated in 1991. She eventually began a postdoctoral fellowship with Catherine Potvin at McGill University.
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Career
Vasseur, who trained in Ecology has developed an interdisciplinary research programme with links to issues such as community-based ecosystem management, climate change adaptation and resilience and sustainable agriculture both nationally and internationally.
In Canada, her research areas include impacts of climate change including extreme events on natural and managed ecosystems as well as rural communities, use of new alternatives in sustainable agriculture, and ecosystem/landscape sustainable development, conservation, and resilience in rural communities in Canada and abroad.
She was part of the co-direction committee of a large project on Coastal Communities Challenges in the face of Climate Change, funded by the Social and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which looked at resilience and ecosystem-based adaptations in ten coastal communities of Atlantic Canada.
She also works in China, where she is a Minjiang Scholar at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, and in Ecuador, where she focuses on the community sustainability and ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change of rural native communities in the Andean region of the Chimborazo.
Vasseur has also been involved in projects in other countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Brazil, Burkina Faso, in Africa.
From 2018 to 2022 she was the President of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, where she was previously Chair of the Sectoral Commission on Social, Human and Natural Sciences. She is the vice-chair for North America on the steering committee of the Commission for Ecosystem Management at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and leads the thematic group on Ecosystem Governance.
Special interests
Vasseur is also very involved in issues related to women in science, engineering, trades and technology. On this topic, she has produced several publications on this topic as well as organized some events and projects to promote gender equality. She is the Past-President (President from 2014 to 2018) of the Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science, Trades and Technology.