CivMin PhD student Keagan Rankin has been selected as one of the recipients of the 2025-2026 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (Vanier CGS) awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
CivMin PhD student Keagan Rankin (MASc 2T3) has been selected as one of the recipients of the 2025-2026 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (Vanier CGS) awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
Providing $150,000 in funding over three years, the scholarship recognizes PhD candidates at Canadian universities who demonstrate excellence in the areas of leadership, research impact and academics. Rankin is supervised by Professor Shoshanna Saxe and Professor Daniel Posen.
The Vanier CGS program plays an important role in fulfilling the Government of Canada’s Science and Technology strategy to promote the development and application of leading-edge knowledge, support the development of a world-class workforce, and attract and retain the world’s top graduate students. Each year, these highly prestigious scholarships are offered to doctoral students who have demonstrated strong leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health.
CivMin had a chat with Rankin to talk about becoming a Vanier Scholar and more.
Congratulations on winning a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m from Fredericton, New Brunswick – on the East Coast of Canada – where I did my undergrad in structural engineering. Then I realized I did not like structural engineering, or at least the job prospects – it just wasn’t for me. Keep in mind, this is during the pandemic.
I decided to pivot into something I found personally more interesting, which was climate mitigation. I just happened to apply to a few places and Shoshana’s [Saxe] research, and Daniel’s [Posen] research fit exactly what I wanted to do. So that’s how I got here, and then I did my master’s here, and now I’m doing my PhD.
My PhD topic is about building enough within climate limits. Specifically, looking at construction and construction materials – construction materials are a huge part of climate change that we don’t think about a lot. By total mass the built environment, the stuff we build, is larger than anything else. More than agriculture, cars, other goods and services. It’s about 10 to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s really hard to reduce those emissions. This is a big problem – my thesis is looking at how we can start to solve this problem.
I just finished a project where we determined the upper limit of how much CO2 we can emit from constructing in the future. We looked at a ton of cities and how could they build the housing and infrastructure they need while still staying within global climate limits. The next project I’m starting is looking at how all these materials affect the energy sector? Or how, when we change the energy sector, does it change the types of materials we can make?
Is this like you’re doing in construction? A full LCA [life cycle assessment] on materials in terms of GHG.
A lot of those LCAs, most of the time, rely on basically what’s called a background system. For example, if one makes a kilogram of concrete in Canada, we assume something about the trucks that are driving the aggregate to site and the cement to site. We assume something about the electricity mix that was used to power the plant that created the cement. In most studies, these background assumptions are simple. They just assume a number along the lines of x number of kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt hour. But what we’re looking at is actually modelling that background system. Daniel [Posen] has led the creation of an energy systems model for Canada called CANOE (Canadian Open Energy Model). Our plan is to use this model to determine how changes in the energy system effect material production and vice-versa.
You’re looking to disrupt the whole model?
We’re trying to set up a specific scope for it, because you can’t model everything. You have to pick and choose what to model so we don’t run into uncertainty and computation problems. The idea is to combine the background, really look at the energy system in depth, and then combine it with the foreground knowledge that we have about the amount of materials we need to gain some insights.
Can you give us an everyday example? You mentioned concrete, but is there something people can identify with?
A great example is housing size. If you just build a smaller home, there’s some research out there that shows it can use much less materials. That’s also a controversial one, because people don’t want to live in smaller homes, necessarily.
Another example would be structural design. There’s a lot of research out there showing most structures are overdesigned, just because engineering firms want to err on the safe side. But you can stay within the building code while making a lot of buildings 30% more efficient, so using 30% less material. Imagine scaling this to the national level – all of Canada. We could start constructing buildings with 30% less concrete or 30% less steel. This would have effects on the amount of energy we actually need to produce that concrete and steel. We would need much less energy for that, which would mean potentially cheaper concrete and steel, and then cheaper homes, or more ability to power that production through alternative fuels such as solar and wind or hydrogen, for steel specifically.
In front of the Galbraith Building is a big timber structure [for Robot Made 2025]. Is timber also something that you look at as alternative materials?
Timber is interesting. It has lower GHG life cycle and GHG emissions than most other building materials. But it’s kind of tricky because you’re running into questions around the land-use and life-cycle of forestry. There can be accounting issues with timber, because researchers doing life-cycle assessments will account for the carbon sequestration of the tree, but they won’t account for the end-of-life release of that carbon. It gets complicated, but timber is generally low emissions. It just requires a bit more care than concrete or steel in the (LCA).
Is this all theoretical, or are there actual projects you’re looking at and advising on, or contributing to? Is there anything out there in the real world that’s being changed by this research?
Yes, we’ve actually worked on a first project. We came up with what’s called a carbon budget, which is basically like an estimate of how much CO2 can we emit in the future to meet the world’s climate goals. And we came up with those budgets for 1,000 cities around the world.
Actually, this whole project started because we were creating a budget for the City of Toronto – we worked with them in a consulting role. I was an intern there. And, because they have this target of wanting to be net zero by 2040, they need to know how they can go from point A – where they are now – to point B, where we want to be (net zero or very close to it). They have looked a lot at production emissions, like out of the tailpipes of vehicles in Toronto, but we expanded that to scope construction emissions. This budget can help the City of Toronto create a science-backed plan to meet their net-zero goal, so it can definitely help inform policy, especially local policy.
How much would you aspire to reduce the GHG by for the average home. Is there a target? You’re a reasonable goal and a lofty goal?
The goal, ultimately, is Net Zero. Is that reasonable, even within the next 25 years? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can really say, but what we find is energy can do a lot. Shifting to electrification and renewable energies – wind and solar and other newer technologies reduce the energy emissions of buildings. The other part is material efficiency – that’s the broad term for reducing the size of housing, designing it better, changing materials. Material efficiency can get you halfway there with the materials, but then you obviously need some materials to build houses. And the unfortunate thing with materials is there’s always some residual emissions. There are these inherent emissions when you make materials that are very hard to reduce, and so you’ll never really hit net zero. If you just electrify and become more efficient, you have to do some sort of other offset, so you need to plant extra trees, or do carbon capture and storage or direct air capture.
Now, is there anything as well human behaviour wise, that would be good to change, or that you are hoping to change? Perhaps.
If we stick to the construction side, it’s tricky, because we don’t necessarily have control over what contractors are building. But, research has shown that living in a smaller space, promoting more multi-unit housing can help. There’s a lot of other lifestyle things that people can do to reduce emissions that are outside the scope of my project. Stuff like eating less meat, flying less – those are the two big ones.
Daniel [Posen] said, if people gave up eating meat, perhaps only one day a week, it would do more than getting rid of all the single-use plastics.
There are some very well-known lifestyle changes that people can make to reduce their emissions. A good example is air travel – air travel is maybe 5% of global emissions, or something very small. If we grounded all planes today, we wouldn’t make a dent in global emissions. At the same time, if you go down to the personal level, as a single person flying on a plane, it is one of the worst things you can do for your personal footprint. Which is a bit of a paradox.
One last thing at the home level is, if you’re a homeowner, installing a heat pump is another big thing you can do. Especially if you use natural gas to heat your home, and you replace that with a heat pump, then that reduces a lot of emissions.
What attracted you to U of T in the first place?
Honestly, it was a bit of dumb luck. Sometimes I volunteer for panels to inform people who are interested in grad school. My advice is always carefully choose your supervisor. But when I applied for my masters, I didn’t do that. I just applied to a few spots across Canada and the UK and I wrote my statement that I was really interested in sustainability infrastructure and data science. Shoshana reached out to me based on the statement, and said, “Hey, I do all the things you listed.” I was like, great. I went to an interview with her and Daniel. It was, that part was, just luck. And it turned out great.
For my PhD I, again, applied to a few places, but this time it was really hard to beat Shoshana, Daniel and our research group in general. The Sustainable Systems group is awesome. Everyone’s really, really smart. Daniel and Shoshanna are probably the two smartest people I’ve met. As supervisors, they’re constantly pushing all of us to improve our research. How can you do it better? How can you communicate it better? What are the practical implications?
In the end, I think the number one thing is the supervisors. U of T also has a great reputation and great facilities, So I am confident they are giving me the best training I could possibly get.
What have you found about Toronto and U of T that you’ve really liked, or perhaps found surprising?
I didn’t know if I was going to like Toronto when I first moved here. In Fredericton, where I grew up, I can look out my bedroom window and see the hospital that I was born. It has just over 60,000 people, so very small, and I’ve lived there my whole life. Moving to Toronto is a very big change, especially to downtown. I love how you meet so many cool people here, especially in grad school – it’s the best way to meet people from all over the world. You have all of these brilliant people from everywhere coming to one building. Toronto is a super, super diverse city. You get to try all this great food, and just a much wider net, and space of experiences, than you get somewhere like Fredericton.
Have you had any classes, or professors besides your supervisors, that have stood or made an impression?
I really liked [Professor] Sebastian Goodfellow’s data science class I took when I first got here, and also [Professor] Nurul Habib’s statistics class. they really helped me think differently about the quantitative side of research. When I did undergrad, I did statistics, and I thought: this suck and it’s super boring. Why would anyone like this? Then I came to grad school and did graduate statistics, and thought wow, this is really cool – I should have done my undergrad in this.
What do you like to do for fun?
I read a lot. No, I tend to listen to a lot of audio books. Because, in a PhD you’re constantly reading things, and the last thing you want to do is go home and pick up an actual book and continue to read. So, I’ve been listening to a lot of history books.
I read a great book recently called Imperial Twilight. It was about Chinese-British relationships leading up to the Opium War. It’s very cool, because historians have some of the earliest records of people from Britain interacting with people from China. It only happened really in the 1700s-1800s, so we have the written accounts of events like the first English man who met the Dalai Lama.
Do you have a hidden talent, or some other hobby?
I play guitar a bit. And when I was younger, I used to row. I rowed somewhat competitively and went to the Canada Games. Then again in university when I was and then stopped for a while.
I just got back from an exchange in Cambridge, England. Cambridge is a rowing hub, so I took it up again. Cambridge University is made up of 31 colleges, and each one has a boathouse on the river. There’s a big race at the end of the year called Bumps, where everyone lines up and competes in this big race. It was super fun. It’s something I’m still doing here – not competitively, but just to stay fit. It’s very enjoyable.
I was a bigger cyclist at home in New Brunswick, before moving to Toronto, and I’ve done a couple of longer biking trips – I’ve biked across Prince Edward Island, and also halfway across New Brunswick with a good friend of mine.
By Phill Snel