The Daniels Faculty is pleased to welcome new tenure-track appointments in the visual studies and forestry programs in 2025/26: 

• Assistant Professor Haseeb Ahmed (effective January 1, 2026)
• Assistant Professor Laura M. Bolt (effective July 1, 2025) 

"Joining our community are two exceptional researchers: one a scientist, the other an artist. Though rooted in such different disciplines, both bring with them new ways of understanding  environmental systems—the habitats we share with others,” said Robert Levit, acting dean of the Daniels Faculty. “We welcome Professors Ahmed and Bolt whose intellectual rigor will enrich our Faculty." 

Haseeb Ahmed is an artist and educator whose work is often collaborative and draws from the hard sciences. Blending art and aeronautics, myth and technology, his practice develops new narrative frameworks for understanding environmental and planetary systems. Over the past decade, Ahmed has structured his research-based artistic practice around the fluid dynamics of wind and water, asking what can be learned about changing climates through the movements of fluids and what they carry, both physically and figuratively.

His responses take the form of drawings, sculptures, installations, and films. Ahmed’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums, biennials, and galleries, including the Gwangju Biennial (2024); a solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; the Göteborg Biennial (Göteborg, SE); De Appel (Amsterdam, NL); Museum Bärengasse (Zurich, CH); The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, USA); Bozar Museum (Brussels, Belgium), and the Frestas Triennial (Frestas, BR), among others. Ahmed is represented by Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels. 

Ahmed holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp, a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dr. Laura M. Bolt is a broadly trained conservation biologist who holds degrees from the University of Cambridge (U.K.), University of Toronto, and Queen’s University (Kingston, ON). Her research interests include animal behavioural ecology, primatology, forest fragmentation, edge effects, animal communication, One Health, and sexual selection. Dr. Bolt’s publications have been named editor’s choice in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology and most-cited in Primates and the American Journal of Primatology. Her research is of broad interest to the general public and has received international media attention, with coverage by news agencies including National Geographic and the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

As director of U of T’s Forests + Animal Behavioural Ecology (FABE) lab, Dr. Bolt’s research program investigates the behavioural ecology of animals and their habitats in order to better understand forest health. Current projects focus on non-human primates, squirrels, and predators living in human-impacted tropical forests in Costa Rica. This research is important given the ongoing deforestation in Central America and other tropical regions globally, with mammals acting as important indicator species to signal habitat change.

As a conservation biologist, Dr. Bolt is a member of the board of directors for Maderas Rainforest Conservancy, a conservation non-profit organization that protects tropical forests in Central America. She is also an associate editor in organismal and evolutionary biology for the journal Royal Society Open Science, and a member of the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Groups for Africa and Central America.