Dr. David Foord (PhD’13) brings a unique historical and social science perspective to the challenges society faces in trying to create a sustainable energy industry.
David, associate professor and acting dean of UNB’s faculty of management, is an historian by training. He brings his knowledge of the past to his research focusing on change and continuity in today’s technological industries.
David is the inaugural Wilson-McKenna Fellow in Digital Sustainability. The fellowship, established through UNB’s McKenna Institute with a gift from Mike and Jane Wilson, focuses on the role of technology as an enabler for environmental, social and governance (ESG) progress. Along with post-doctoral fellow Taylor Gray, David is conducting research on topics like decarbonization in the electric power industry and governance of transitions. He has also, in conjunction with Taylor, developed a course on ESG for the BBA and MBA programs within the faculty of management.
“Historians take you into the past,” David says. “They take you into, say, Canada in the 1850s to give you a sense of the political, social, cultural, economic and technological contexts and how different that time was from the present. They also try to get you to think about the continuities and changes between those past worlds and the present.”
This historical research has informed his social science studies in contemporary social and technological transitions, fostering insights into how industrial transitions have worked in the past and in the present.
“One of the strands of social science work focuses on sustainability transitions – how do we transition from our current economic and political system into one that is decarbonized and sustainable? There is a whole social science research field that has arisen in the last 20 years which tries to understand that.”
His contributions to this field were recently recognized at a national conference of business and management researchers. At the 2025 Administrative Sciences Association of Canada Conference, David received multiple Best Paper awards and won the Spark Tank pitch competition for his presentation on Canadian infrastructure transitions.
