Brandon Schaufele, Director
Brandon Schaufele is an Associate Professor of Business, Economics and Public Policy at the Ivey Business School. Schaufele was appointed Director of the Ivey Energy Policy and Management Centre in February 2022. He was previously a Consortium Fellow with the Centre. His areas of expertise are regulation, policy and markets, with a focus on the energy sector. He is Treasurer of the Canadian Economics Association and a past Chair of the Canadian Resource and Environmental Economics Association. Brandon has consulted with companies and governments in Canada and the U.S., and has testified as an expert witness on energy economics at the Muskrat Falls Inquiry and in commercial litigation. Previously he was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa and served at the Research Director of the Insitute of the Environment and for Sustainable Prosperity.
Adam Fremeth, Associate Director &
E.J. Kernaghan Professor in Energy Policy
Adam Fremeth is Associate Director of the Ivey Energy Policy and Management Centre, the E.J. Kernaghan Professor in Energy Policy, Associate Professor of Business, Economics and Public Policy, and MBA Program Faculty Director at the Ivey Business School. His research focus is on how firms engage and respond to public policy, with particular attention to regulated utilities and the upstream oil and gas sector. Ongoing research projects include how firms engage with First Nations communities through the application of Impact and Benefit Agreements, the role of activist groups on regulatory rulings in the electric utility sector, and the patterns of personal campaign contributions by Chief Executive Officers. His work has been published in top tier economics and management journals. This research agenda has been awarded numerous national grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and he was named a Fulbright Scholar for 2018/19. He received his HBA from the Ivey Business School, his MA from Carleton University and his PhD from the University of Minnesota.
Bissan Ghaddar, Research Lead
Bissan Ghaddar is an Associate Professor of Management Science at the Ivey Business School working on problems at the intersection of smart cities, IoT, and optimization models. Prior to joining Ivey Business School, she was an Assistant Professor in Data Analytics at the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. She has also worked on energy, water, and transportation network optimization at IBM Research and on inventory management problems at the Centre for Operational Research and Analysis, Department of National Defence Canada. Dr. Ghaddar holds a PhD in operations research from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her work has been published in prestigious journals such as Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Transportation Research, among others. Her research has been supported by national and international scholarships including NSERC, Cisco, H2020, and FP7 IIF European Union Grant.
Guy Holburn, Faculty Lead, Electrification Research Program
Guy Holburn is Professor of Business, Economics and Public Policy at the Ivey Business School. Holburn is the founder of the Ivey Energy Policy and Management Centre, and served as Director from 2010-2022. He is currently the faculty lead for the Centre's Electrification Research Program. His areas of expertise are regulation, governance, and business strategy, with a focus on the energy and utilities sectors. He has published widely in top peer-reviewed academic journals and has authored more than a dozen reports on provincial and federal energy policies. He is a Director of London Hydro, a board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, and on the Council for Clean and Reliable Energy. Holburn has served as a consultant and advisor to corporations and governments in Canada and the U.S. He has provided advice on economic impact assessments, corporate governance, merger/acquisition strategy, regional economic development strategy, electricity pricing policy, pipeline regulation, and corporate performance improvement. He testified as an expert witness on utility regulation and Crown corporation governance issues at the Muskrat Falls Inquiry in 2018 and 2019. He has also testified in court as an expert witness on business strategy issues in commercial litigation. He holds a PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA Hons. (First Class) from Cambridge University. Previously he worked for several years as a management consultant for Bain and Company in the U.K. and in South Africa.
Joshua Pearce, Academic Fellow
Joshua Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His energy research spans areas of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, as well as energy policy and economics. Joshua runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group. He has worked with, consulted for, and been funded by dozens of renewable energy companies as well as the US Government and the UN. He is currently serving on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee for the Role of Net Metering in the Evolving Electricity System. He was previously a Fulbright-Aalto University Distinguished Chair and is a visiting professor of Photovoltaics and Nanoengineering at Aalto University as well as a visiting Professor Équipe de Recherche sur les Processus Innovatifs (ERPI), Université de Lorraine, France.
Brian Rivard, Adjunct Research Professor
Brian Rivard is an Adjunct Research Professor for the Ivey Energy Policy and Management Centre and a member of Ontario’s Electricity Market Surveillence Panel. His area of expertise and study is electricity market design and regulation. He has experience as an energy consultant, most recently as a Principal at Charles River Associates. He also worked for the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) as Director of Markets. While working at the IESO, he was responsible for providing analysis of the impacts of changes to the IESO Market Rules, Market Design, government policies, and other industry initiatives. For almost 15 years at the IESO, he helped support the development of market-based approaches to managing Ontario’s electricity system needs. In addition, he spent six years as a senior economist with the Canadian Competition Bureau. He has also provided expert testimony before the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Ontario Energy Board. He received his MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Western Ontario.
Yixuan Pang, Centre Coordinator
Yixuan is a recent graduate from Western University of Ontario and holds a Master degree in Research Intensive Program focused on education, critical policy, equity and leadership.
