Ilan Vertinsky

Ilan Vertinsky’s work is widely known for its excellence, rigour, relevance, and interdisciplinary breadth. A common focus of his research to date has been the intersection of uncertainty, resilience, and environmental discontinuities. Much of his research on systems resilience is concerned with specific episodes and is explicitly “event-centric” in its methodology. These event-centric case studies work effectively as instrumental research arguments. However, unlike most scholars who do case research, Dr. Vertinsky uses the cases to build computational models of the real processes and mechanisms that he and his colleagues have observed—models that can be systematically varied to identify more or less robust/resilient institutional designs.

Dr. Vertinsky received his BA in Economics from Hebrew University and a PhD in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley. He held an appointment at Northwestern University before joining UBC’s Institute for Animal Resource Ecology and the divisions of Management Science and Policy Science in the Faculty of Commerce & Business Administration as Assistant Professor in 1970. A prolific author, he has published eight books to date and has received many awards for his research achievements, including the UBC Killam Research Prize.