Dr. Yvonne Su is a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and an Associate Professor at York University. An interdisciplinary scholar researching transnational issues, her expertise spans forced migration, queer migration, global remittance economies, climate change adaptation and climate (im)mobilities. Her research adopts a field-based, policy-oriented, and community-centred approach with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

In the last five years, Dr. Su has secured over $12 million in external research funding. Currently, she is part of three multi-million-dollar grants researching climate adaptation and resilience in Ghana, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Canada and the Arctic. These transdisiplinary and multi-country studies combine climate models, remote sensing, community mapping, ethnography, participatory GIS and digital story-telling to unpack, document and examine climate impacts and community response around the world.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Dr. Su has spent over a decade examining the socio-ecological impacts of climate change, focusing on how social inequalities shape communities’ adaptive capacities and disaster responses. Her research on Indigenous knowledge systems and disaster risk reduction was cited by the IPCC. As an expert on climate migration she helped write the UNHCR’s Global Recommendations on Nationality and Statelessness in the Context of Climate Change and has reported on climate change for Foreign Policy, The Globe and Mail and The Conversation.

In Latin America, Dr. Su has been conducting high-risk research in the unstable border cities of Pacaraima, Boa Vista, Manaus in Brazil and Cúcuta in Colombia. She coined the term “intersecting precarity” - the combination of homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and gender-based violence - experienced by marginalized groups such as Venezuelan LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees. Currently, she leads a multi-year SSHRC Partnership Development Grant on Bogotá’s LGBTQ+ Houses. In addition, Dr. Su is often asked to provide expert testimonies and reports in refugee determination hearings for LGBTQ+ Venezuelan asylum seekers. To date, she has helped four of them obtain refugee status in the United States.

As an interdisciplinary migration expert with lived experiences of migration, Dr. Su is committed to critically engaged research that examines contemporary transboundary challenges through a Global South lens, centring marginalized communities and advancing the decolonization of research and knowledge production.