Steven Lade

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About

Dr Steve Lade is an ARC Future Fellow at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, Research Cluster Co-lead for Risk, Vulnerability and Resilience at the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions (ICEDS) and Researcher at the Institute for Water Futures.

Outside ANU, he is Commissioner and co-lead of the Safe and Just Boundaries workstream at the Earth Commission convened by Future Earth, member of the Steering Committee of Future Earth Australia, member of the Editorial Board at Ecology & Society, member of the Resilience Alliance.

After a PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University (2007-2010) and a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (2010-2012) he worked as a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University (2012-).

He was an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Fenner School from 2017-2021, with travel to Australia supported by a mobility grant from the Swedish Research Council Formas. In 2021, he was granted a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council.

He has published over 50 scientific articles, of which over 20 were as first author, in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), Nature Sustainability and Science Advances. He has presented at over 50 scientific conferences, co-organised two conference sessions (at Resilience 2014 and MODSIM 2021) and co-organised one workshop (at Kioloa, with Prof Xuemei Bai) and multiple workshops for the Earth Commission.

Dr Lade has taught in over 16 undergraduate and postgraduate courses. He has co-convened a course on Sustainability Science, convened course modules on Resilience for Sustainable Development and on Adaptive Governance, convened an evening adult education course on Sustainable Futures and delivered an executive education course on Resilience: Theory and Practice.

Affiliations

Research interests

Dr Lade takes a complex systems approach to studying the resilience of systems of humans and nature, from local to planetary scales. He integrates mathematical methods and concepts with knowledge and approaches from other disciplines. He uses these tools in a broad range of intensive interdisciplinary collaborations on topics including water resources, Earth system science, climate change, biodiversity loss, fisheries, poverty and agriculture. He currently holds an ARC Future Fellowship, an ARC Discovery Project, and is a Commissioner at the Earth Commission convened by Future Earth.

Projects

Teaching information

  • Regime shifts
  • Dynamical systems
  • Complex systems
  • Earth system science

Location

Robertson Building (46)