Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech Ph.D.

Dr. Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech

Engineer | Innovation Policy Strategist | Academic Trailblazer
Associate Professor, Systems and Resilience Engineering Lab | Policy Director, SHIELD Automotive Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence

Dr. Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech is a visionary at the nexus of engineering, policy, and technological innovation, whose career has been marked by a relentless pursuit of understanding how systems evolve, adapt, and transform under the forces of innovation, regulation, and disruption.

An Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, Dr. Schuelke-Leech serves as the Policy Director for the SHIELD Automotive Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence and chairs the Research Cluster in Scientific Argumentation for the Interdisciplinary PhD in Argumentation. She also leads the Systems and Resilience Engineering Lab, where she advances methods for analyzing and designing complex adaptive systems in sectors where failure is not an option.

Her intellectual framework is forged from a rare combination of real-world industry experience and academic distinction. Beth-Anne began her career as a mechanical engineer at General Motors of Canada, specializing in energy systems and product development. Her decade-long tenure in the automotive and manufacturing industries also included leadership roles at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, where she helped bridge academic research with industrial application.

Dr. Schuelke-Leech’s academic journey reflects her hunger for precision and her passion for public impact. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from McMaster University, an MBA in Finance and Strategic Management from York University’s Schulich School of Business, and a Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy from the University of Georgia, where she explored how financial and regulatory systems enable or constrain technological innovation.

Her research spans innovation ecosystems, nuclear policy, automotive cybersecurity, and alternative energy adoption. She is currently spearheading groundbreaking studies on the regulatory friction points affecting Gen IV nuclear development, the intersection of public and private finance in R&D, and the implications of policy uncertainty on strategic investment in the energy and transportation sectors. She is particularly interested in how Big Data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be applied to extract policy signals from complex corpora—a passion that culminated in the creation of PolicyTALK, an applied research platform at Ohio State and beyond.

Beth-Anne’s work is informed by both theory and engineering pragmatism. A licensed Professional Engineer with Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) and a Research Associate at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), she remains deeply embedded in the systems she studies. Her affiliations with the Resilience Engineering Association and the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) reflect her commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Throughout her career, Dr. Schuelke-Leech has remained focused on one core challenge: how to ensure that public policy not only supports innovation, but understands it. Her work has earned her a reputation as a translator of complexity—a systems thinker fluent in the languages of code, capital, and Congress.

A sought-after advisor, educator, and keynote speaker, she is mentoring a new generation of engineers, analysts, and policymakers to think bigger, design smarter, and lead with both rigor and vision. She believes the future of energy and manufacturing lies in embracing disruptive technologies like nanotech and fast-spectrum nuclear reactors, not simply managing their risks but harnessing their transformative power.

When she’s not decoding innovation trends or consulting with regulatory bodies, Beth-Anne is known to travel on short notice—passport always ready—for research, collaboration, or the simple thrill of global discovery. She currently resides in Ontario but maintains close academic ties with the United States, particularly through her affiliations with Ohio State and the U.S. energy research community.

Dr. Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech is one of the rare minds shaping not just how we power the world—but how we think about powering it.