Stephanie Bertels honoured with SFU President’s Award for Leadership in Sustainability

Beedie School of Business associate professor Stephanie Bertels.

Beedie School of Business associate professor Stephanie Bertels has been awarded the SFU President’s Award for Leadership in Sustainability, recognizing her efforts in advancing the cause of sustainability both within and beyond the University.

Each year, SFU recognizes one faculty member, one staff member and one student with the award. The recipients share SFU’s commitment to engaged leadership and serve as inspirations and role models to the University’s students, graduates, and community.

Bertels has a long-standing interest in sustainability, specifically how organizations can develop and implement innovative strategies for a sustainable future. Her research focuses on how organizations make the transition towards sustainability by undertaking practitioner informed research on sustainable operations, embedding sustainability, and sustainable innovation.

She is the research lead of the Embedding Project, which helps global companies embed sustainability into their operations and decision-making. The project brings together thoughtful sustainability intrapreneurs from across industries and around the world, and harnesses their collective knowledge to develop rigorous and practical guidance that benefits everyone.

As both the director for Beedie’s Center for Corporate Governance and Sustainability and the associate director of the CMA Center for Innovation Bertels hosts productive national and international knowledge exchange among scholars and practitioners addressing corporate governance and sustainability issues helping to enrich SFU’s research environment.

Bertels is an enthusiastic teacher and regularly coaches graduate student sustainability case competition teams. Recently, she coached a team of Beedie graduate students who were selected for the regional final of the prestigious Hult Prize for Social Entrepreneurship. Last year her students took second place at the 2015 Business for a Better World – Corporate Knights Case Competition, held at the World Economic Forum.

She is also the faculty sponsor and advisor for the SFU Net Impact chapter, connecting students with sustainability professionals and helping organize the SFU Net Impact Sustainability Challenge, a sustainability-focused case competition for graduate business students in the Pacific Northwest.

“There is a deep pool of talented sustainability researchers at SFU, and I’m very honoured to have been selected as this year’s recipient of this award,” says Bertels. “SFU has been committed to sustainability for a long time – long before many other schools started to take notice. I’m also excited about the recent work to envision a sustainable future for the university through SFU2021, which not only addresses our operations but also our research, teaching, and our engagement in our community. “

Bertels was one of three recipients of the 2016 award, alongside urban studies student Wes Regan and major contracts procurement officer Laura Simonsen. The trio was presented with the awards at the annual awards dinner held at the SFU Burnaby campus on March 9.