Sian Kou Giesbrecht (she/her)
Assistant professor, School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University
Liber Ero Chair
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Sian received her BSc from McGill University and her MA/MPhil/PhD from Columbia University, examining nitrogen-fixing trees and their role in forest ecosystems. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Environment and Climate Change Canada, where she  worked on the representation and analysis of carbon and nitrogen cycling in the Canadian Land Surface Scheme Including Biogeochemical Cycles (CLASSIC), which is the land surface component of the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM). Sian was an assistant professor at Dalhousie University from 2023 to 2025 and started at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at SFU in 2025. Sian is involved in the Nitrogen/N2O Model Intercomparison Project (NMIP) and the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). She loves sunlight, fresh air, fresh fruit, and working with others to help care for our planet.
Lauren Gover (she/her)
Lauren is a MSc student in the CLIMB lab. She is originally from Newfoundland, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Biology at MUN. For her honours thesis, she researched the size structure and density of a population of northern sea cucumber in the lower Arctic. Her current research interests centre on how nitrogen availability will impact carbon sequestration in the boreal forest and shrub expansion with rising temperatures, given future global warming. 
Renée Hall (she/her)
Renée is a PhD student in the CLIMB lab. The focus of her doctoral research is nitrogen cycling within CLASSIC-Canada, the land surface component of the Canadian Earth System Model which has been specifically tailored to the pan-Canadian domain. Her research seeks to implement, examine, and evaluate the representation of nitrogen cycling and different formulations of reactive nitrogen gas emissions from wildfires in CLASSIC-Canada, and explore how these reactive nitrogen gas emissions and their feedbacks to climate change will evolve over the 21st century.
Prior joining Sian’s lab Renée worked as a data scientist, and her previous projects include fungal spore prediction for agricultural pathogens and the design of forestry modelling for optimizing carbon sequestration and minimizing environmental risk factors. Her undergraduate degree with Quest University was in Agricultural Sustainability, where her honours thesis analyzed life-cycle assessment studies on the greenhouse gas emissions from beef production systems. 
Shijing Liang (she/her) - starting January 2026
Shijing is a PhD student in the CLIMB lab. Her research is driven by a curiosity about how living vegetation evolves and interacts with a changing climate. She obtained undergraduate and master's degrees from the Southern University of Science and Technology in China. Her doctoral work focuses on projecting carbon and ecosystem co-benefits of forest-based climate solutions in Canada. I aim to use CLASSIC model configured for high-resolution simulations over the Canadian domain and developed future forest management scenarios to explore carbon sequestration potential, impacts on local water availability, disturbances, and long-term biodiversity benefits.
Ana Flavia Brancalion Costa (she/her)
Ana is a postdoc in the CLIMB lab. Ana holds a BS in Civil Engineering and an MS in Water Resources and Sanitary Engineering from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where she worked on simulations of accidental spills in rivers across South America. In August 2025, she completed her PhD in Earth System Science at Auburn University. Her doctoral research focused on process-based models for constructed wetlands, including nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment dynamics to simulate pollutant retention. She also compiled CO2 and CH4 data and developed predictive models of carbon dynamics across the United States. Ana enjoys taking on new challenges, traveling, and can always be found with a cup of coffee.
​Lacey Swamy (She/Her)
Lacey is an undergraduate research assistant in CLIMB lab. She is currently a third-year student at SFU, pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Computing Science and a Certificate Degree in Sustainable Development. Lacey is passionate about leveraging technology to address the climate crisis. In the lab, she supports the configuration and testing of CLASSIC models on DRAC high performance clusters.
Alumni
Allie Pell, Honours undergraduate project 2024-2025 (Increasing Evergreen Trees Reduces Soil Nitrogen and Aboveground Biomass
Accumulation in Canadian Forest Plots)
Paige MacCarthy, Honours undergraduate project 2024-2025 (Exploring the terrestrial carbon sink at a global scale: the effects of nitrogen fixation, nitrogen deposition and CO2 fertilization)