I was born in Toronto and lived there until leaving for post-secondary studies in 1999. I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University in 2003 with a double major in Geography (Urban Systems) and Theoretical Computer Science. At the time, I was the first student (and perhaps maybe the last) to choose this double major. Combining interests, in 2003 and 2004 I worked toward a Masters degree in Spatial Analysis from Ryerson University. My masters research project, advised by Maurice Yeates, focused on a comparison of spatial regression models for hedonic house price estimation.
Following my Masters, I left academia briefly to pursue an R&D position at Environics Analytics. At the time, EA was a fledgling start-up carving out a space in the Canadian geodemographic marketing industry. During the 16 months that I was there, I worked on EA’s line of enhanced census products and a couple of really cool consulting projects. The first project was for the Ontario Growth Secretariat to define the built-up boundary of the Greater Golden Horseshoe region. For the second project, we developed a spatial interaction model to support branch planning for a major US retail bank.
In 2006, I left EA and started studying toward a PhD degree at McMaster University under the supervision of Antonio Páez. I completed a dissertation focusing on the social sustainability of automobile oriented land use and transportation systems. At the same time, I wrote a number of papers exploring dense network topology in spatial econometric techniques and specification issues in geographically weighted regression. I was an investigator in two federally funded research projects investigating transport related social exclusion in Canadian cities.
In 2010, I graduated from McMaster and began teaching as a limited term Assistant Professor at Ryerson University. A year later, my wife and I got married and moved to Salt Lake City so that I could take up a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Alas, three years later we have left Utah for our home city of Toronto, where I am now a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.
Dr. Steven Farber 