Nicole Vaugeois

Building: 250 Room: 320A
Phone: (250) 753-3245, Local 2772
Fax: (250) 740-6488
E-mail Nicole Vaugeois
Web site: http://web.viu.ca/vaugeois/

Web blog for Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development: http://ruraltourismdevelopment.blogspot.ca/

As Regional Innovation Chair in Tourism and Sustainable Rural Development, Dr. Nicole Vaugeois supports rural communities to use amenity based industries like tourism and recreation to diversify their economies. 
Vaugeois, who has a PhD in Tourism Planning and Development from Michigan State University, provides support to these communities such as research, information, ideas and insights.

She encourages the development of a rural lens to support policy and planning decisions in non urban contexts. Her work extends throughout British Columbia where she is engaged in numerous research projects with communities and organizations that do not have research capacity but require information to develop sustainable transitions using natural and cultural amenities to draw visitors.  Some of her recent projects include working for Canada’s Rural and Cooperatives Secretariat to develop a typology of natural and cultural amenities in rural Canada and to extract lessons learned from regions using amenities as the driver for new rural economies. She is also part of the research team on the Protected Areas and Poverty Reduction project led by Dr. Grant Murray. Here she is working with her colleagues to understand the role of protected areas, as a natural amenity, on the well-being of adjacent communities. On this project she contributes to the knowledge mobilization committee to ensure that the project studies and learns about how to effectively share research knowledge between community, academic and government stakeholders and between the study sites in Tanzania and Ghana.

Vaugeois works closely with partners at the University of Northern British Columbia and Thompson Rivers University and has developed a community of practice in rural tourism in BC. As an ongoing initiative in her position as B.C. Regional Innovation Chair at VIU, she works with partners to host the BC Rural Tourism Conference (April 19-21, 2011). Another of her research contributions has been in linking research to teaching, and in supporting undergraduate research. Through the Recreation and Tourism Research Institute at VIU, Vaugeois has initiated projects to connect undergraduates with research experiences which benefit communities while instilling research savvy into the next generation of research practitioners.

Regional innovation chairs have three main goals:

• To support applied research, development and innovation that will bolster regional economic and social development in all areas of the province.
• To attract highly qualified people in areas relevant to regional social and economic development.
• To support collaboration between post-secondary institutions and their regional communities.