People

Centre Staff

Bethany Hastie, Associate Professor and Director

Bethany Hastie joined Queen’s Law as an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace in 2026. Her research spans a broad array of labour and employment law topics, including technological change, freedom of association, and employment discrimination, and is animated by concerns about the growing divergence between the legal regulation of work and the day-to-day realities, needs and interests of workers. Prior to joining Queen’s Law, Professor Hastie was an Associate Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She earned her JD at UBC, and LLM and DCL at McGill University.  Full Bio

Abdou Rahim Lema, Research Coordinator

Abdou Rahim Lema is the Research Coordinator for CLCW at Queen’s University Faculty of Law. In this role, he supports the Centre’s research, communications, events, and partnership activities, contributing to the advancement of scholarship and public engagement on issues related to work, labour, employment, and workplace governance. Prior to this role, he held positions with the Canadian Association of African Studies, the PRAME Research Centre at the Université de Montréal, and the Strategic Analysis Network, where he worked in research coordination, project management, and academic communications. Lema holds a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Université de Montréal, a Master of International Relations from the Yenching Academy at Peking University, and a BA in International Relations and Economics from Hacettepe University and İpek University. 

Research Affiliates

Kevin Banks, Associate Dean (Faculty and Academic Policy), Associate Professor, Faculty of Law

Kevin Banks is Associate Professor of Law at Queen’s. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, and a co-ordinating editor of Labour and Employment Law, Cases, Materials and Commentary. His research publications address relationships between economic globalization, technological change and labour and employment law;; employee freedom of association at common law; the role, governance and potential influence of international and transnational labour labour law; efficiency and delay in Canadian labour arbitration; the influence of originating political struggles on definitions of indirect discrimination in North America and the European Union; the extent and causes of gaps in the workplace accommodation of persons with disability; the accessibility and effectiveness of employment standards compliance and enforcement, and the role of good faith in the contract of employment. Full Bio

Pierre Chaigneau, Associate Professor & Commerce '77 Fellow of Finance, Smith School of Business

Pierre Chaigneau is an Associate Professor & Commerce '77 Fellow of Finance at Smith School of Business at Queen's University. He obtained a PhD in Finance from the London School of Economics, a MSc in Economics at Ecole Normale Superieure, and a MSc in Management (grande Ecole program) from HEC Paris, and was previously Associate Professor of Finance at HEC Montreal. Full Bio

Richard Chaykowski, Professor, Cross-appointed with the Faculty of Law, Employment Relations Studies

Richard Chaykowski is a Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science where he teaches in the Employment Relations programs. He is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law and a member of the Advisory Board for the Centre for the Study of Law in the Contemporary Workplace. He was the Director of the graduate MIR Program (Master of Industrial Relations and Professional Master of Industrial Relations programs), and undergraduate Employment Relations program, in the Faculty of Arts and Science, from 2015 through mid-2022. Full Bio

Amitava Chowdhury, Chair of the Department of History & Director of the Global History Initiative

Amitava Chowdhury is Chair of the Department of History at Queen's University and Director of the Global History Initiative. A historian and historical archaeologist, his research examines plantation labour regimes, labour migration, and colonialism in the British Empire, with a particular focus on the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work explores the histories of diaspora, labour law, identity formation, and nationalism, especially among overseas Indian communities, while also engaging with broader questions in global history and diaspora theory. From 2001 to 2004, Dr. Chowdhury conducted pioneering historical archaeological research in colonial Mauritius. Two of the sites he excavated—Aapravasi Ghat and Le Morne Brabant—were later designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites. He has also published extensively on the history and archaeology of fugitive slave communities in Mauritius and the Caribbean. Dr. Chowdhury is a former Fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Full Bio

Samuel Dahan, Associate Professor; Director, Conflict Analytics Lab; Queen's National Scholar, Labour & Employment Law, Faculty of Law

Prof. Samuel Dahan is the Founder of OpenJustice, an open-source platform and community that provides no-code development tools, and hosting infrastructure for legal AI applications, enabling users to embed legal reasoning into language models. He is also the Head of Deel Lab, Deel’s research division dedicated to global employment policy and HR technology. He has spearheaded the development of a dozen AI projects, including the Deel AI Classifier, MyOpenCourt, and OpenJustice. Full Bio

Claire Davies, Professor, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science

My interest in biomedical engineering evolved while volunteering at Bloorview Children’s Hospital (now Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital). I realized that the technology available to these children did not allow them the same freedom as other children. I have since dedicated my research career to improving the lives of people with disabilities. My research is diverse covering three main areas: biomaterials, motion analysis and assistive technology. Full Bio

Bhargav Gopal, Assistant Professor, Smith School of Business

I am an economist at Smith School of Business, Queen's University, doing research at the intersection of labor, finance, and law and economics. I received a PhD in Economics from Columbia University in 2023. Prior to Columbia, I received a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley in 2015 and was a Research Fellow at Stanford Law School from 2015 to 2017. Full Bio

Rebecca Hall, Associate Professor, Department of Global Development Studies

Resource extraction; feminist political economy; settler colonialism; Indigenous resurgence; social reproduction; northern development; gender-based violence; labour.

As a feminist political economist concerned with social justice, my research examines how land and resources are accessed and organized, and how people work, care and reproduce upon these lands. My work maps the ways in which global capital draws upon gendered, racialized, and colonial structures in processes of dispossession and exploitation. At the same time, I am interested in highlighting local spaces of feminist, anti-racist and decolonizing resistance to the pressures of global capital. Full Bio

Robert Hickey, Director and Associate Professor, Employment Relations Studies

Robert Hickey joined the School of Policy Studies in January 2006 as a faculty member in the Master’s of Industrial Relations program. He teaches one of the core MIR courses, unions and collective bargaining, as well as a course on negotiations and dispute resolution. He is frequently asked to participate in continuing education programs for union officers and staff. Full Bio

Fiona Kay, Professor of Sociology

Fiona Kay is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research interests include the sociology of law and work and occupations. She is presently engaged in a longitudinal study examining career pathways of lawyers in civil and common law jurisdictions of Canada. A second study explores the work and regulation of paralegals with attention to issues of access to justice. She has authored numerous articles on gender and racial diversity in the legal profession, mentorship, professional development, job satisfaction, career mobility, earnings attainment, and attrition from the professions. Her articles have appeared in American Sociological Review, Law & Society Review, Social Problems, McGill Law Journal, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Queen’s Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Policy, Annual Review of Law & Social Sciences, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Resources, Canadian Review of Sociology, and Advances in Life Course Research. Full Bio  

Steven Lehrer, Professor, Queen's Economics Department

My research interests are in empirical microeconomics and are quite broad. I enjoy getting my hands dirty by analyzing new datasets, exploring how recent advances in several scientific fields can enrich economic models of human development, using experiments to address issues that are intractable with available field data, and above all, pursuing economic issues that are important in the current economy. My methodological interests currently center on new tools that incorporate heterogeneneity in policy evaluation and exploring how applied econometric tools can be used in conjunction with machine learning algorithms in economic applications. Full Bio

Maroussia Lévesque, Assistant Professor in Law & AI

Maroussia Lévesque is an Assistant Professor in Law & AI. Her research focuses on AI governance, examining regulatory design, power imbalances and market concentration in the AI industry, and the respective roles of public and private actors in the governance ecosystem. Her current project analyses how the corporate structures of frontier AI labs shape their behaviour in practice, and prior work articulates how AI reconfigures work and examines the role of tech workers in AI governance. She is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and a member of the Indigenous-led Abundant Intelligences project. Prior to joining Queen’s, Professor Lévesque completed her SJD at Harvard Law School, where she lectured in Comparative AI Governance (with Professor Martha Minow). Full Bio 

Sitian Liu, Assistant Professor, Queen's Economics Department

I am an Assistant Professor at Queen's University. My research is in the fields of labor economics and urban economics. I received my PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2019 and BS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Full Bio

Paula Lopez-Pena, Assistant Professor, Business Economics, Smith School of Business

Paula Lopez-Pena is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics at the Smith School of Business, Queen's University. She completed her PhD in Economics at the University of Warwick and held postdoctoral appointments at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Bangladesh. Her research lies at the intersection of development, labor, health, and organizational economics. Using field experiments and longitudinal data, she studies how adverse life experiences—from everyday stressors to traumatic events—shape health, well-being, and labor market outcomes, and she evaluates scalable interventions that can prevent or mitigate these harms. Her current research examines workplace hostility, employee well-being, intimate partner violence, forced displacement, and mental health, with the goal of identifying policies and organizational practices that improve both worker well-being and organizational performance. She is an Invited Researcher with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Jobs and Opportunity Initiative at MIT and a Research Affiliate with the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) at Yale University. Full Bio

Eddy Ng, Professor & Smith Professor of Equity and Inclusion, Smith School of Business

Eddy Ng is a Professor of Organizational Behaviour and the Smith Professor in Equity & Inclusion in Business at Queen’s University. He was previously on faculty at Bucknell University, where he held the James & Elizabeth Freeman Chair in Management and served as a DEI Faculty Fellow, and at Dalhousie University, where held the F.C. Manning Chair in Economics & Business. Full Bio

Dan Samosh, Assistant Professor, Employment Relations Studies

Dan Samosh joined the Employment Relations Programs unit at Queen’s University in July 2022. He is broadly interested in researching the career success and workplace inclusion of individuals with stigmatized social identities. At present, his research is focused on the work experiences of persons with disabilities, including three foci: 1) leadership emergence of persons with disabilities, 2) disability stigma and social identity, and 3) workplace inclusion of persons with disabilities. Full Bio

Bradley Weinberg, Associate Professor, Employment Relations Studies

Dr. Weinberg’s current research focuses on the longitudinal study of collective bargaining relationships during the representation phase of the unionization process.  In particular, he analyzes the factors that contribute to the preservation or dissolution of such relationships.  His emphasis on studying the representation phase, meaning beyond the settlement of the first collective agreement, addresses the dearth of empirical quantitative analysis of the experience and evolution of bargaining relationships throughout the later stages of their lifecycle. Full Bio

Graduate Trainees

Ansha Nega Ahmed, Postdoctoral Researcher, Employment Relations Studies

Ansha Nega Ahmed is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Queen's University, working under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Samosh. She earned her PhD in Rehabilitation Science from Queen's University, an MSc in Ergonomics and Human Factors from Loughborough University (UK), and a BSc in Occupational Health and Safety from the University of Gondar, Ethiopia. Dr. Ahmed's research focuses on improving the health, wellbeing, and workforce participation of workers through work disability prevention, return-to-work initiatives, disability-inclusive employment, and occupational health research. Her current projects examine mentorship for the career success of people with disabilities, return-to-work experiences following work disability, and the development of early career researchers through her monthly Early Career Researchers (ECR) Talks. Before joining Queen's, Dr. Ahmed served for more than a decade as a faculty member at the University of Gondar and Addis Ababa University, where she contributed to research, teaching, global partnerships, and disability-inclusive development initiatives. Full Bio

Phil Henderson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Global Development Studies

Phil Henderson is a settler scholar, originally from the territories of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. His current research project investigates the interrelations between organized labour and Indigenous land/water defence movements in the contemporary Canadian context. In this work Phil is particularly interested in understanding the conditions of work and workplace organizing that contribute to either solidarity or conflict between these movements. Phil’s work has been featured in many venues including, most recently, New Political Science and the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) journal. He is currently editing a book on labour-Indigenous relations, and has two manuscripts nearing completion on Canadian colonialism.

Julia Otte, PhD Candidate in Management (Business Economics), Smith School of Business

Julia Otte is a PhD Candidate in Management (Business Economics) at the Smith School of Business, Queen's University, where she is expected to defend her dissertation in July 2026. Supervised by Dr. Veikko Thiele, her research develops theoretical models at the intersection of managerial economics, dynamic pricing, labour economics, and workplace inclusion. Her work examines how firms learn from market interactions, optimize pricing and product offerings, and design policies that foster inclusive workplaces. Her research includes studies of dynamic pricing and customer returns in online retail, subscription box services and curated retail, and workplace inclusion for employees with concealable identities. She has co-authored research published in the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy and is currently developing new theoretical work on identity disclosure and organizational inclusion. In addition to her research, Julia teaches Managerial Economics and the Mathematics Bootcamp for graduate students at the Smith School of Business. Full Bio  

Idorenyin Williams, PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies

Idorenyin Williams is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of feminist political economy, care, labour, and global development. Her research examines the gendered impacts of resource extraction on Indigenous women in Northern Canada and the Niger Delta, exploring their experiences both as workers in extractive industries and as members of communities shaped by historical and ongoing resource extraction. Drawing on feminist political economy, Dr. Williams investigates how care work, unpaid labour, and other forms of non-waged work—performed predominantly by women—sustain extractive industries and global development while often remaining legally and economically unrecognized. More broadly, her research explores how extractive sites organize labour, social relations, and everyday life within Indigenous communities. By bringing feminist perspectives to the study of work, gender, and care, her scholarship contributes to a deeper understanding of the gendered and racialized dimensions of labour in the contemporary extractive economy. Full Bio